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Visual Accessibility

Cursorless has multiple settings that can be customized to improve accessibility for users with color blindness or other vision impairments. The primary visual elements of Cursorless are the hats, so this guide will focus on customizing the hats.

Make the hats bigger​

Say "cursorless settings" and find the cursorless.hatSize setting. This setting allows you to increase the size of the hats. You may need to change the vertical offset of the hats to keep them from clipping the line below / above.

You may also want to increase your line height to allow you to make the hats even larger: say "show settings say line height" and increase the line height to your preference.

A reasonable place to start is to set the line height to 1.6 and the hat size to 70.

Use shapes instead of colors​

If you are a user with color blindness, it may be helpful to disable a subset or all colors and enable shapes instead. You can do so by saying "cursorless settings" and finding the cursorless.hatEnablement.colors and cursorless.hatEnablement.shapes settings.

Tweak your color scheme​

You can change the colors of the hats by saying "cursorless settings" and finding the cursorless.colors.light and cursorless.colors.dark settings.

There are several user-created color schemes available on the Cursorless wiki. One notable color scheme is the Greyscale for Night Owl theme, which is designed to reduce visual stimulation and be compatible with most forms of color blindness. Instead of colors like "yellow", "green", etc, it uses "bright" and "dark". Here's how you use it:

  1. Say "cursorless settings" and find the cursorless.colors.light or cursorless.colors.dark settings depending on your preferred mode
  2. Change your default color to #848384
  3. Change your blue color to #ffffff
  4. Change your green color to #333333
  5. Disable the other colors using the cursorless.hatEnablement.colors setting
  6. Change spoken forms within your Cursorless settings folder located at cursorless-settings/hat_styles.csv so that you have bright, blue and dark, green. This is within your Talon configuration, not the IDE settings. This will change the spoken forms to match the new colors so that you can say eg "take bright air" to select the word "air" with a bright hat. See Customization for more information on how to change spoken forms.