Skip links, a four-way motion setting applied before the first paint, the editor shortcuts worth learning, and an honest list of the places Novus is still not good enough.
A music visualizer is motion by definition, which makes it an awkward product to write an accessibility page about. The temptation is to publish a paragraph saying you are committed to WCAG and leave it there. That is worse than saying nothing: it tells a disabled visitor the product has been checked when it has not.
So this post is the same bargain the accessibility page makes. Here is what exists, here is how to use it, and here is the list of things that are genuinely not done.
Press Tab on any page and the first stop is a Skip to content link that jumps past the entire top navigation and moves focus into the page body. It is invisible until it takes focus, so it costs a sighted mouse user nothing and saves a keyboard user the whole menu on every single route.
Underneath that, every page renders exactly one main landmark. That is not a convention anybody is trusting: an automated test walks the application and component source and fails the build if a second one ever appears, so jump to main content in a screen reader stays unambiguous.
These are the ones that exist today, and the exact keys they listen for:
That input guard is the pattern, not a detail
A single-letter global shortcut is only safe if it steps aside for text entry. The fullscreen toggle checks what has focus before acting; anything new added to this list is expected to do the same.
Ambient page animation (drifting gradients, shimmer, pulse glows) is written so its static first frame is the default. The keyframes only run inside a prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference query, which means turning the preference on in your operating system does not fight the animation; it never starts.
The canvases obey the same preference, which used to be the gap on this page and no longer is. The homepage hero paints one composed frame and stops. Every engine preview loads paused behind a play control rather than starting itself, and previews stop on their own when scrolled out of view or when the tab is hidden.
On top of the operating system there is a site-level motion setting with four states: follow my system (the default), full motion, reduced motion, or no animation at all. Your choice overrides the OS in both directions, which is the case a pure prefers-reduced-motion implementation cannot serve: someone who wants the previews running anyway, or who wants them still on a machine whose system setting they cannot change.
It is stamped onto the document by an inline script in the head, beside the theme one, so it applies to the first frame rather than after hydration. There is no flash of the motion you asked not to see.
Reduced and off are deliberately different
Reduced keeps the short fades that tell you a control responded, and keeps phone haptics. Reducing motion is a request about motion sickness, not a request to lose feedback. Off is off.
Your motion preference stops the marketing previews. It deliberately does not alter a composition you are editing or exporting. That is your document, not site decoration, and an accessibility setting that silently rewrites someone's project is editing their work without asking.
The consequence is honest and slightly uncomfortable: visualizer output is motion, and some modes flash on the beat. There is no global reduce output motion switch yet. Until there is, preview at a low reactivity setting before committing to a long export, and lengthen the audio release so the scene drifts rather than snaps. Every Audio Reactivity Control, Explained covers the settings that do that.
A browser test drives the axe-core rule set across a representative set of pages of a real production build, failing on the WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 A and AA rules, color contrast included. It runs as a ratchet: the outstanding findings are recorded per page, and the test fails both when a new one appears and when a recorded one is fixed without being removed from the list.
That second half is the unusual bit and it is the one that makes the number mean something. Debt that cannot quietly grow is common. Debt that cannot be quietly forgotten, because paying it off is also a failure until you say so, is what stops a recorded list becoming a museum.
Listed so you can decide whether Novus works for you now, rather than finding out halfway through a project:
The theme toggle in the top navigation switches light and dark, and the choice is applied by an inline script before the page paints, which matters most to people who chose dark mode for light sensitivity. Browser zoom and operating-system text scaling work normally, because the layout is fluid rather than fixed-width.
Tell us what you were trying to do, the page you were on, and the assistive technology and browser you use. Accessibility reports are treated as defects rather than feature requests. The accessibility page carries the address, and the contact page works too.
If you are picking a scene and motion sensitivity is the constraint, the calmest options in the catalog are the slow ones: read Choosing the Right Visualizer Engine for Your Genre with that in mind, and note that the Terrain engine has a mode built specifically for wide, soft, slow backgrounds.
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