Accessibility

The app follows Apple's accessibility guidance for macOS, iOS and iPadOS, and this site is written to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 at level AA. Both are self assessed. Nobody outside Layacut has audited either, and this page says so rather than implying otherwise.

Every control that is only an icon carries a name, so a screen reader reads the control rather than the picture on it. Every action the app offers is reachable from the keyboard: the File menu carries the commands and their shortcuts, the space bar and the K, J and L keys drive playback, Escape closes what is open, and Command F finds footage. Motion is annotation coming alive, never decoration: every transition on a control is short and eased, and the system's Reduce Motion setting turns it off. The interface is monochrome by design, with color reserved for meaning, and every reading is also written as a label rather than carried by color alone. On an iPhone or an iPad, the controls and the floating bars are Apple's own Liquid Glass; the system's Reduce Transparency setting replaces the backdrop behind them with a plain, steady ground.

Layacut cuts video, so the reel it makes is what it is: the footage you gave it, with your music under it. Captions are transcribed on the device from what was said, and you choose whether they are on.

The pages are plain text over a dark or a light ground, and you choose which with the control at the corner; the default follows your system. Text scales with your browser's zoom. Every image carries a description, the pages read in order without their styling, and the one thing that moves on its own, the film at the top of the front page, is silent, hidden from screen readers, and replaced by a still when your system asks for reduced motion.

The app has not been driven end to end with VoiceOver by a person. The names are there and the order is checked by machine, and that is not the same as somebody who relies on a screen reader having cut a reel with it. The footage list and the shot strip are dense, and a dense view is where a screen reader has the hardest time. If you use one, your report is the most useful thing we could receive.

The app's text is set at sizes chosen for the instrument it is, and does not yet follow the system's text size setting on the Mac, or Dynamic Type on iPhone and iPad.

If something in the app or on this site is in your way, write to hello@vasly.app and say what you were trying to do and what happened. We answer within five business days, and a report that names a control we got wrong is fixed in the next release.