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Wholisphere Docs

Motor tools

Tools that help if you can’t or don’t want to use a mouse, or if you use voice / switch / eye-gaze input.

Voice command

What it does. Push-to-talk voice control. You say what to click, scroll to, or fill in; Wholisphere translates your speech to a DOM action and executes it.

Example phrases:

  • “Click sign in.”
  • “Scroll to the FAQ section.”
  • “Fill in my email as alice@example.com.”
  • “Open the menu.”
  • “Go back.”

When to use. Whenever your hands aren’t on the keyboard, or you find clicking targets hard. Works alongside dictation tools like Talon or built-in OS voice control.

How.

  1. Click Voice command or press Ctrl+Shift+V / Ctrl+Alt+V.
  2. Wholisphere announces “Listening” — speak your command.
  3. After you stop talking, Wholisphere acts and speaks confirms (“Done. Sign in.”) or refuses with a reason (“Sorry. I couldn’t find that button on the page.”).

Safety. Wholisphere applies three guardrails before executing:

  • Selector sanitation — only DOM elements visible on the page can be targeted.
  • Off-origin navigation block — voice commands can’t follow links to a different domain without an extra explicit confirmation.
  • Confidence threshold — if the model isn’t confident enough about what you meant, Wholisphere asks rather than guessing.

Limits. Browser microphone permission is required. Microphone use is local-only when the browser supports it (window.SpeechRecognition); otherwise audio is streamed to the cloud STT API.

WCAG: 2.5.4 Motion Actuation, 2.1.1 Keyboard.

Keyboard helper

What it does. Three things bundled:

  • Visible focus ring — overlays a yellow ring on the browser’s currently-focused element, layered above any poor-contrast or missing focus indicator the page provides.
  • Focus mode (the keyboard variant) — adds an underlay that dims everything except the focused element. Different from the cognitive Focus mode: cognitive follows your pointer, this one follows your keyboard focus.
  • Reorder without dragging — see Sortable assist below.

When to use. Pages with poor or missing focus indicators (many SaaS apps), or pages where you can’t easily tell where the focus is from a quick glance.

How. Click Keyboard helper in the popup. Toggles in the panel:

  • Focus highlighter on/off — the yellow ring.
  • Focus mode on/off — the dim underlay.

WCAG: 2.1.1 Keyboard, 2.4.7 Focus Visible.

Sortable assist (Reorder without dragging)

What it does. Drag-and-drop is hard if you can’t use a mouse precisely. Sortable assist surfaces every reorderable list on the page in a side panel and gives you Up / Down / Move-to-position buttons for each item.

Strategy.

  1. First attempt — synthesizes HTML5 drag events that target the item’s intended new neighbor. Works on most native drag-and-drop and React DnD wrappers.
  2. Fallback — direct DOM reorder if you opt in. Wholisphere warns you that DOM-only changes may not persist on server-backed lists. You confirm before the change is made.

When to use. Any reorderable list — kanban boards, todo lists, file managers, playlist editors.

How. Click Reorder without dragging under Motor. Wholisphere detects sortable containers and lists each in a side panel. Use the Up / Down buttons.

Limits. Lists that use proprietary input handling (drawing canvases, custom event hijacking) may not respond to synthesized drag events. The DOM-fallback path is your escape hatch.

WCAG: 2.5.7 Dragging Movements.

See also

  • Cognitive tools → Form helper — pairs well with Voice command for filling forms.
  • Modes — Voice command works in either mode, but if you’re in Focus mode the page is in charge of your typing, not Wholisphere.