How Ptions+ behaves with assistive technology, what has been verified, and what does not work yet. Last reviewed 2026-08-31 against version 1.2.0.
Ptions+ is a menu bar utility with no Dock icon. Its interface is the menu bar dropdown, the Settings window, and the About window.
Verified manually on macOS with Full Keyboard Access enabled (System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard navigation).
| Surface | Path |
|---|---|
| Menu bar dropdown | Focus the menu bar with Ctrl+F8, arrow to the Ptions+ item, Return to open. Arrow keys move through Enabled, Settings, About, and Quit. |
| Quit | Cmd+Q while the dropdown is open. |
| Settings window | Tab and Shift+Tab move through the tab bar, the profile sidebar, and every control in the profile editor. Space activates a button, Return opens a menu. |
| Profile sidebar | Arrow keys move the selection. The add-profile toolbar button is in the tab order. |
| Assign a shortcut | Tab to the Assign menu, Return to open, arrow keys to a system action or preset, Return to apply. |
| App picker | The search field takes focus on open. Tab to the list, arrow keys to move, Return to select, Esc to dismiss. |
Focus indicators are the system ones; Ptions+ does not draw its own and does not suppress them.
Every interactive control exposes an accessible name. Icon-only controls carry an explicit label:
| Control | Accessible name |
|---|---|
| Menu bar icon | "Ptions+, enabled" or "Ptions+, disabled" |
Add profile (+ toolbar button) |
"Add app profile" |
| Assign / Change menu | "Assign mapping for Back", and so on per button |
Clear mapping (✕) |
"Clear mapping for Back", and so on per button |
| App picker row | The app name, with "Already configured" as its value where it applies |
| Shortcut recorder | "Shortcut recorder", with help text describing what to press |
Purely decorative images — the permission-guide icon, app icons in the picker, and the About window icon — are hidden from assistive technology so they are not announced as unlabelled graphics.
No state is signalled by colour alone. The event-tap status row, the configuration warning, and the permission warning each pair their colour with a text label and an SF Symbol. Ptions+ uses system colours and system text styles throughout, so it follows the system appearance, the accent colour, Increase Contrast, and Reduce Transparency without special handling.
Text uses the standard SwiftUI text styles rather than fixed point sizes, so it tracks the system text size.
These are real and are stated rather than left to be discovered.
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Recording a custom shortcut requires a physical key press. The recorder captures raw key events in order to store a physical key code, so a shortcut cannot be recorded through VoiceOver's keyboard commander or through a switch-control scanning interface. The system actions and the 16 presets are fully reachable from the Assign menu without recording anything, and cover the common cases.
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Accessibility permission is mandatory and is granted outside the app. Ptions+ cannot intercept mouse buttons or post keyboard events without it. Granting it happens in System Settings, which Ptions+ can only open for you.
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The mapped buttons themselves are a pointing device. Ptions+ makes extra mouse buttons useful; it does not provide a keyboard-only route to the actions those buttons trigger. Every action it can send — Mission Control, Spotlight, and the rest — already has a system keyboard shortcut.
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The Debug monitor is a live event log. It updates as you move the mouse, which makes it noisy under a screen reader. It is a troubleshooting tool and nothing in normal configuration requires it.
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VoiceOver has not been tested against every third-party screen reader. Verification has been done with VoiceOver on macOS only.
Accessibility defects are ordinary bugs. Open one on the issue tracker and say which assistive technology and which macOS version you were using.