The engine

Kinetic Access

Web accessibility stopped at screen readers, contrast and keyboard order — all of which assume you can already hit the thing you are aiming at. For hands that shake, drift or tire, the games industry solved that assumption twenty years ago. These are its four techniques, ported to the browser: client-side JavaScript, no plugin, no special hardware. Try each one live below, or run the full comparison in the Access Lab.

Tremor smoothing

What games do

Every console ships input smoothing: the raw stick signal is filtered before the game sees it, so a trembling thumb still draws a steady line. Racing games have done it since the 1990s.

What the web does instead

Nothing. The browser hands every pixel of pointer jitter straight to the page. A 6 px tremor on a 24 px close-button is a coin flip.

What we built

The 1€ Filter (Casiez, Roussel & Vogel, CHI 2012) on each pointer axis. Unlike a moving average, its cutoff varies with speed: heavy damping when nearly still — where tremor lives — and almost none during fast movement — where intent lives. Steady aim without the treacle feeling.

Try it

Turn on Assist with a simulated 12 px tremor, then move your cursor slowly near the buttons below. The teal dot is what the page sees.

Gravity wells

What games do

Aim assist. Crosshairs decelerate over targets and curve gently toward them. It is in effectively every console shooter, invisible when tuned well, and nobody calls it cheating when the alternative is not playing.

What the web does instead

Targets are geometric absolutes: one pixel outside a link is a miss, with WCAG asking politely that targets be at least 24 px.

What we built

Every interactive element projects a gravity field. Within range, the cursor is pulled toward the target's centre on a squared falloff — strong hold near the middle, gentle at the rim — and the captured element gets a dashed outline so you always know what a press would hit.

Try it

With Assist on, drift between these three. Feel the handover.

Dwell activation

What games do

Hold-to-confirm and radial menus that select by hover time — standard since Vogel & Balakrishnan's dwell-clicking research (UIST 2005) and universal in eye-tracking games.

What the web does instead

The click is compulsory. For hands where pressing a button also moves the cursor — most tremors — every click risks landing somewhere else.

What we built

Rest on a captured target and a progress ring fills around the cursor; at 100% the element is focused and pressed, with a short refractory period so it cannot double-fire. Hold time is yours to set, 400–2400 ms. WCAG 2.2 asks for a no-dragging alternative (2.5.7) — this is it.

Try it

Enable dwell, then hold your pointer still on the target.

Echo map

What games do

3D audio wayfinding: The Last of Us Part II ships a sonar ping that renders the level's layout in positional sound, and blind players finish the game with it.

What the web does instead

Screen readers linearise the page into a list. Order survives; geography — what is beside what, how far down the thing you want is — does not.

What we built

Press Alt+E and each landmark of the page pings once through an HRTF panner — left of you, right of you, pitched higher when above the viewport — followed by its spoken name. A visible transcript mirrors the scan, so the sound is an alternative route, never the only one.

Try it

Headphones recommended — the spatial effect is the point.

Prove it

Numbers, not vibes

Open the Access Lab

The Access Lab draws your raw pointer path and the filtered path side by side, then runs a five-target hit test with Assist on and off, so the improvement is a miss-rate you can read, not a feeling you have to trust.