Accessibility

Last updated July 20, 2026 · applies to Desktop Ducky for macOS and Windows, and to this website

Desktop Ducky is a decorative animated desktop toy — a rubber duck floating on a skin of water drawn over your screen. Animation is the product, which makes accessibility a real design problem rather than a checkbox, and we have tried to take it seriously. The app includes some accessibility-related settings, offered as a convenience to people who may find them helpful — not as a guarantee of accessibility. This page describes those settings and the limitations we know about.

Please read this first. This page is informational and is provided as a convenience only. It describes design intent, not guaranteed results: nothing on this page is a promise, representation, warranty, or conformance claim, and nothing here forms part of any contract. Any feature described below may work imperfectly, behave differently on your system or with your assistive technology, or be changed or removed in an update, and this page may lag the shipped app. The only agreement that governs the app is the license agreement, including its health and safety notice, disclaimers, and limitations — please read it, especially before relying on any setting for a medical or sensory condition.

We do not claim conformance with WCAG 2.1, EN 301 549, Section 508, or any other accessibility standard, guideline, or law — for the app or for this website. We refer to those standards when designing, but the app is a toy drawn by a custom renderer and has not been audited or certified against any of them. If something doesn't work for you, please tell us: hello@desktopducky.com. We cannot promise a fix or a timeline, but reports are how problems get found.

What the app attempts

Each item below is offered as a convenience and describes what the setting is designed to do. We do not represent that any of it works for any particular person, condition, system, or assistive technology.

Motion

A three-way Motion setting intended to follow your system's reduce-motion preference (macOS "Reduce Motion", Windows "Animation effects"), force full motion, or force reduced motion.
Under reduced motion, the app is designed to stop the duck's bobbing, drifting, breathing, spin and tumble animations, suppress the water wake, hold rain still, sit the minnow school out, show menu bubbles without wobble, and cut and slow celebration confetti.
Left alone, the duck is designed to wind down to a stop rather than idle in perpetual motion.
Animated toys (rain, minnows, bath, typing desks, companions) have their own off switches, and the tray menu's Hide Duck is intended to remove the overlay.

Flashing and photosensitivity

A dedicated Reduce flashing toggle intended to disable the color-cycling rain style and the screen-water shimmer and chromatic fringe, and to slow the typing-peck animation cadence. We use WCAG 2.3.1's flash thresholds as a design reference, but we do not represent that anything the app draws — with or without this setting — stays under any threshold or is safe for any person or condition. Please see the health and safety notice in the license agreement.
Reduced motion is designed to imply reduced flashing.
We have not deliberately built lightning or strobe effects, but we make no representation about what any combination of settings, content behind the water, and hardware may produce on a given screen.
A photosensitivity warning appears in the license agreement presented on first launch.

Text and contrast

A minimum text size floor (12–25 pt) intended to apply across the app's own text, by resizing layouts rather than clipping (WCAG 1.4.4's resize principle is the design reference).
A High contrast mode intended to brighten type and heavy up borders, focus rings, and backdrops.
An optional ink outline on the duck, intended to help legibility against busy wallpapers.

Keyboard

M is intended to open the menu ring with keyboard focus: arrow keys or Tab to move between bubbles, Enter to pick, Esc to close, with Settings and Quit reachable this way.
The settings window is designed to be operable by keyboard: Tab/arrows to move focus with a visible focus ring, Space/Enter to activate, Left/Right to adjust, Esc to close.
The first-run license and permission cards are designed to be keyboard-operable (scroll keys, Enter, Esc).
The tray / menu-bar icon offers Show/Hide, Settings, and Quit through the operating system's own menus.

Screen readers

On Windows the app attempts to announce through UI Automation notifications; on macOS through VoiceOver announcements.
The menu ring, settings controls (focus moves, value changes, tab switches), and the first-run cards are designed to announce themselves and their outcomes. We cannot promise these announcements work with every assistive technology, version, or configuration.

Sound

Master volume and a one-switch mute all; individual volume controls for the app's sounds; per-toy mute chips.
Sound is intended to be decorative rather than to carry essential information.

Known limitations

The duck himself and his toys — dragging, feeding bread, the bath, fishing, the wardrobe closet, the typing desks — are visual, pointer-driven play and have no screen-reader or keyboard equivalents. They are the toy's content, in the sense of a snow globe. We have tried to make the housekeeping functions (settings, hide, quit, licensing) operable by keyboard and announced to screen readers, but we do not represent that they — or any part of the app — are accessible to any particular user, with any particular assistive technology, or in any particular configuration.
The app draws its own interface with a custom renderer, so beyond the announcements described above it does not expose a full accessibility tree to assistive technologies.
The app has not been audited or certified against WCAG 2.1 AA, EN 301 549, Section 508, or any other standard, and must not be relied on, procured, or deployed for settings where conformance with any accessibility standard or law is required.
This page may be out of date relative to the shipped app, and any feature or setting described here may change or be removed in an update.

This website

We refer to WCAG 2.1 AA when building this site — semantic structure, a skip link, visible focus outlines, labels on videos, pause buttons on moving media, and support for prefers-reduced-motion (with it set, the animated hero is intended to hold a still poster and feature clips to wait for you to press play) — but we do not claim that the site conforms to it or to any other standard.

Feedback

If you hit a barrier, email hello@desktopducky.com with what happened and what you expected. We cannot commit to any particular fix or timeline, but reports are how problems get found. Please give us the chance to look into things — under the license agreement we ask for thirty days to try to resolve a concern informally before formal proceedings.