Help / Reference
Keyboard shortcuts and accessibility
Vesari Stylus has one true keyboard shortcut and a lot of ordinary Tab-and-Enter behaviour. This page lists what is bound today, what the sliders do under a key, and where keyboard and screen reader support is thin.
Shortcuts
| Keys | What happens |
|---|---|
| Ctrl+B | Collapses the left navigation rail to icons, or expands it again. Ignored while the cursor is in a text box, so it never eats a B you meant to type. |
| Tab / Shift+Tab | Moves forward and back through buttons, sliders and text boxes. |
| Enter or Space | Presses whatever currently has focus. |
| Enter in a text box | Runs the title bar search; confirms a playlist rename; starts the release search on the ripping page; activates a licence key in Settings. |
| Escape | Closes the full-screen player, the Up Next queue, the output device popover, the add-to-playlist menu, the cover art search, and the plan and unlock windows. Answers no to a confirmation, and cancels a rename in progress. |
| Ctrl and a click | Adds or removes a row from the selection, in the track list and the Tag Editor. |
That is the whole list. There is no menu bar, no customisable key map, and no claim on your media keys, so a Play/Pause key on a keyboard or headset will not reach the app. To start playback from the keyboard, Tab to the play button in the bottom bar and press Space.
What the sliders do
Focus a slider with Tab:
| Slider | Arrow keys | Page Up / Page Down | Home / End |
|---|---|---|---|
| Progress bar in the player bar | a tenth of a second | a larger jump | start / end of track |
| Volume in the player bar | 1 percent | a larger jump | silence / full |
| Seek bar in the full-screen player | 5 seconds | 30 seconds | start / end of track |
| Crossfeed in DSP Rack | the next preset along | one preset | first / last preset |
| Meter trim fader in DSP Rack | one step | a fifth of the fader's range | bottom / top |
On the player bar's progress slider the seek is sent only when you release the key, so holding an arrow moves the marker and then jumps once. With Bit-perfect mode on, the volume slider is disabled at unity, so the arrow keys do nothing.
What a screen reader hears
The rail buttons, the transport, the tiles and the dialogs are real buttons that announce with a name, and the collapsed rail keeps its names because each icon carries its label as a tooltip. Beyond that:
- Toasts sit in a polite live region, so they are read out as they appear. The scan progress toast opts out, otherwise every indexed file would interrupt.
- Badges in the track list carry text meant only for readers: HR reads as "Hi-Res audio", and CUE names the file the track was cut from.
- Sliders speak a useful value rather than a bare percentage: the full-screen seek bar reads elapsed and total time, the crossfeed slider the preset name.
- On album and artist tiles the name underneath is itself a button, so a tile can be opened without a mouse, not merely played. Playlist cards match: the name opens the playlist, the pencil beside it renames it.
Where keyboard support runs out
- A track row cannot be selected or started from the keyboard. Tab steps through the artist, album and genre links in a row and the add-to-playlist button at its end, but selection is a click and playing is a double-click. A keyboard-only listener starts music from the Home page, whose rows answer Enter and Space, from an album or artist tile, or from the player bar.
- Both equalisers in DSP Rack want a mouse. The ten graphic EQ band faders are drag-operated and answer no keys, and the Parametric EQ curve beside them is the same: drag a node to move it, scroll to change Q, and neither takes focus. The keyboard route to those same bands is Settings > Playback > Parametric EQ, where frequency, gain and Q are number boxes you can Tab into. Crossfeed and the meter trim fader are keyboard-operable in the rack itself.
- Several dropdowns announce their value but not their name. In Settings a reader hears the current setting, "Dark" for instance, without hearing that the control is Theme. The visible label is read as ordinary text just before it, not as the control's name.
- Not every window closes with Escape. The full-screen player, the queue, confirmations and the unlock windows do. Import from drive, Duplicate cleanup, the split-artist review, the CUE sheet editor and the shuffle chooser do not, so use their own close button, which Tab reaches.
- The focus outline is the browser default in most places. The links inside track rows and the tiles draw a clearer ring in your accent colour.
Motion and appearance
Settings > General carries Reduce motion, which cuts animation and transitions back to almost nothing. Some animation, including the spinning record on the startup screen, also steps aside when Windows itself is set to reduce motion, with or without the in-app switch. Theme and accent colour live in the same place: see Appearance and themes.
If a control will not take a key
A control you can only reach with a mouse is worth reporting. Use Report a Bug in Settings, and name the screen and the control. Is this a bug? How to report it covers what to include.