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Accessibility & theming

boincrs is designed to stay readable regardless of your terminal's color scheme, font, or emulator quirks.

Principles​

  • Text labels first. Every meaningful state has a textual tag — [RUN], [WAIT], [READY], [REPORT], [ACTIVE], [IDLE], [ERROR], [suspended], [no-new-work]. Color is additive, never load-bearing.
  • Focus without color. The focused pane shows [focus] next to its title. The selected row uses >> plus reverse video, so focus stays visible in monochrome terminals too.
  • Terminal theme wins. boincrs inherits foreground and background from your emulator. It does not ship a custom palette or attempt to detect "light" vs "dark" themes.

NO_COLOR support​

Setting the NO_COLOR environment variable disables all color accents:

NO_COLOR=1 cargo run

Everything else — labels, reverse-video selection, focus markers, keyboard cues — stays the same. The UI remains legible in terminals with limited color support or monochrome settings.

Keyboard-only workflow​

  • Move pane focus with tab / shift-tab or left / right.
  • Move within a pane with j / k or up / down.
  • Invoke actions via single-letter keys (see Keyboard reference).
  • Confirm destructive actions with y; cancel with n or Esc.

No action requires the mouse.

Known constraints​

  • Terminal applications cannot reliably detect whether the emulator uses a light, dark, or high-contrast theme. boincrs favors default foreground/background colors plus explicit labels over theme-specific palettes.
  • Reverse video, bold, and underline rendering can vary between emulators and fonts, especially over SSH and inside multiplexers like tmux. Text labels keep the meaning stable even when styling is inconsistent.
  • boincrs does not currently expose a per-widget palette override. Accessibility is driven by your terminal theme and the NO_COLOR convention.

Testing accessibility locally​

Run through the smoke checklist at least once in:

  1. Your normal theme.
  2. A light theme (with a light-background terminal).
  3. NO_COLOR=1.

Each run should still produce a readable view with visible focus and selection cues.