Accessibility
Sonar is a working tool, and a tool nobody can operate is not much use. We want it to be usable by people who navigate by keyboard, use a screen reader, magnify the screen, or need reduced motion.
What works today
- Keyboard — every control is reachable and operable without a mouse. A visible focus ring follows you, and a "Skip to content" link is the first thing you reach so you can jump the navigation.
- Dialogs — announce themselves as dialogs, take focus when they open, close with Esc, and return focus to whatever you were on when they close.
- Screen readers — buttons that show only an icon carry text labels, form fields are labelled, and the result count is announced when it changes rather than updating silently.
- Reduced motion — if your system asks for less motion, transitions and hover movement are switched off.
- Read aloud — signals and AI answers can be spoken by the browser, for anyone who finds reading a screen tiring or difficult. This runs on your device; nothing is sent anywhere.
- Ask by voice — a microphone button dictates a question instead of typing it, which helps if typing is painful or slow. It is off until you press it. Note that your browser sends that recording to its own speech service to transcribe; see the Privacy Policy. The button is hidden in browsers that cannot do this, rather than shown broken.
- Zoom and small screens — the layout reflows to 320px and to 200% zoom without content being cut off or requiring sideways scrolling.
- High contrast — borders are preserved under Windows high-contrast mode, where colour-only edges would otherwise vanish.
- Colour — colour is never the only way information is conveyed; strength, actionability and priority all carry text as well.
Known gaps
Being straight about these is more useful than a blanket claim:
- The corridor map is a visual view. Every signal it shows is also in the list and table views, which are fully keyboard accessible, but the map itself is not a good screen-reader experience.
- Charts in Analytics convey their figures visually. The underlying numbers are available through CSV export and the API.
- We have tested with keyboard navigation and automated checks. We have not yet done a full audit with screen-reader users, which is the only way to find what automation misses.
Assistive technology we work with
Sonar runs in current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, and is built to work with the screen readers those browsers pair with — NVDA and JAWS on Windows, VoiceOver on macOS and iOS, TalkBack on Android.
Tell us when something does not work
If any part of Sonar is difficult or impossible for you to use, please tell us — it is treated as a defect, not a feature request.
Please include what you were trying to do, the assistive technology and browser you use, and where it went wrong. We aim to respond within five working days, and will tell you what we can fix and when.
If you need something from Sonar that you cannot currently reach, say so and we will get you the information another way while we fix it.