Accessible Trader — User Manual

This is the full reference manual for Accessible Trader. It explains every part of the terminal in depth: what each feature does, when you would reach for it, the keys that drive it, and the speech you should expect to hear as you go. It assumes you already understand core trading ideas — candles, support and resistance, stops and take-profits, trailing stops, moving averages, oscillators — and concentrates on how those ideas are expressed and controlled inside this application.

If all you want is a one-line-per-shortcut crib sheet, press F1 inside the app or read SHORTCUTS.md. If you are brand new, the shorter QUICKSTART.md (Quick Start Guide) is a gentler tour. This manual is the place to come when you want to actually operate a feature and understand what it is doing.

How to read this manual

• Keys appear inline, like Alt+K or Ctrl+Shift+T. A chord such as Ctrl+Shift+T means hold Control and Shift together, then press T.
• Spoken feedback is written in quotation marks exactly as the application says it, for example "Loading history…". When a value changes with your symbol or price, it is shown in braces, like "{Symbol} on {Provider}, {Timeframe}. Ready."
• Web-host modifier note: on the Linux browser host, every Ctrl+Shift+letter chord becomes Alt+Shift+letter (the browser reserves the Ctrl+Shift versions). The letter and the command are identical. None of the onboarding keys in this chapter are affected. See the Platform Support chapter for the full remap.

Getting Oriented

Accessible Trader is a full trading terminal — real-time and historical data across stocks, crypto, forex and more — built so that none of it depends on sight. Every function, from placing a drawing tool to tuning an indicator's timbre to submitting an order, is reachable from the keyboard, and nothing requires a mouse. What makes the application different from a conventional platform with a screen reader bolted on is that it was designed around sound from the start, and it treats your screen reader and its own audio engine as two halves of one instrument.

The Hybrid Voice model

The central idea, which everything else builds on, is what the application calls the Hybrid Voice model. Your screen reader and the built-in sonification engine carry different kinds of information at the same time, and neither replaces the other.

Your screen reader — NVDA, JAWS, Narrator, VoiceOver, TalkBack, or Orca on the web host — handles everything exact and textual: the precise open, high, low and close when you land on a candle; an indicator's exact reading when you move to it; dialog labels, menu items and settings; and the confirmation messages after you act. If you need a number, the screen reader is where it comes from.

The sonification engine handles everything continuous and structural: the rising and falling pitch of price as it moves through time, the tonal texture of an oscillator as it swings overbought or oversold, distinct bell tones for events like crossovers and divergences, the stereo position that tells you where in the visible window you are, and volume that scales with how significant a move is. If you need a shape — a trend, a rhythm, a sense of where pressure is building — the audio engine is where it comes from.

The point of running both together is that you perceive precise values and broad structure at once, which is something a conventional chart cannot offer in either direction. During playback you hear them in concert: the screen reader speaks each bar's numbers while the engine plays that bar's sonic shape. You can also lean on one alone — silence the audio and work by speech, or mute speech and listen to pure shape — and later chapters show you how to toggle each as the task demands.

The soundscape

Because so much of the terminal speaks in sound, it is worth learning the vocabulary once; after that it becomes second nature and you will stop having to think about it.

Pitch maps to value, everywhere and consistently. Higher pitch means a higher price or a higher indicator reading; lower pitch means lower. A rising trend is a rising pitch; a sell-off slides downward. For oscillators that have a centre line — an RSI, a MACD — pitch rises above a mid-point for positive readings and falls below it for negative ones, so zero has a recognisable pitch you come to know by feel.

The kind of sound — its timbre, the tonal colour rather than the pitch — tells you where a value sits relative to the structure that matters. An oscillator above its zero line uses one waveform and below it uses another, so you can hear which side of zero you are on without checking a number; and when a reading pushes into an overbought or oversold extreme — on a bounded oscillator such as RSI, Stochastics, MFI, CCI, Williams %R, or the Ultimate Oscillator — a noise texture roughens the tone so the extremity itself is audible. It is a pronounced roughness, not a faint wash, and you can set how strong it is per level with the Zone Texture slider in an indicator's properties (P), under Reference Levels. You learn to hear "deep oversold" the way a sighted trader sees a line pinned to the bottom of its range.

On top of the continuous tones, discrete events ring as short bells, and each event type has its own bell so you can tell them apart by ear: a smooth sine bell for crossovers, a bright metallic triangle bell for divergences, a high pure crystal bell for support and resistance levels, a shimmering detuned pair for high-confluence signals, and a rich multi-harmonic blend for momentum signals. When a bell catches your attention during playback you can stop and read the exact event through your screen reader.

Two more cues round out the picture. Stereo position places you in time: the leftmost visible bar plays hard in the left channel and the rightmost hard in the right, so as playback advances or you move the cursor rightward the sound travels across the stereo field and you feel your position in the window without a spoken word. And the engine layers sound by depth — quieter background tones for long-term context, mid-level tones for the main price and oscillator voices, and the loudest layer reserved for signals and event bells — so an important event cuts through the continuous wash instead of competing with it at the same volume.

None of this needs to be memorised before you start. Load a chart, press the right arrow a few times, and let the pitch move with the price; the rest of the vocabulary arrives naturally as you meet it in the chapters that follow.

Loading a Market

When the terminal first opens it is deliberately quiet. There is no chart, no symbol, and no spoken greeting — just an empty workspace waiting for you to tell it what to look at. That silence is intentional: the application never assumes which market you trade or whose data you pay for. This chapter takes you from that blank start to a live, navigable chart, and explains what you will hear at each step so you always know where you are in the process.

The whole sequence is short once it is familiar: connect a data source if the provider needs credentials, pick a market, provider, symbol and timeframe from the toolbar, and press Load. The terminal then fetches recent history, announces that the chart is ready, and — where the provider supports it — begins streaming live bars.

Connecting a data source

Market data comes from providers, and many of them require an account and an API key before they will return anything. You manage those credentials in the API key manager, which you open with Alt+K. Your screen reader announces the dialog as "API Keys", and it opens on a list of any profiles you have already configured, followed by a form for adding a new one.

A profile is one set of credentials for one provider in one environment. The "Add New Profile" form walks top to bottom: choose the Provider (Alpaca, Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Oanda, Polygon, Schwab and the rest, or "Custom"), give the profile a Profile Name you will recognise later — the placeholder suggests something like "Alpaca Paper" — and set the Environment to either Paper or Live. Paper points the provider at its simulated/sandbox endpoints; Live uses your real, funded account. Below that you set the Market Type (Spot, Futures, Crypto or Stocks) and then enter the API Key, the API Secret, and, only if your provider issues one, a Passphrase (it is labelled Optional and you can leave it blank for providers that do not use one). All three secret fields are masked.

Activate the Save Profile button and the terminal confirms with "Profile {name} saved". A profile must be the active one for its provider before its data or trading access is used in the current session; if you keep more than one profile for a provider — say a Paper profile and a Live profile — select the one you want and activate it, and you will hear "{name} set as active". The active profile is read back in bold in the profile list so you can confirm at a glance which environment you are about to trade against. This Paper/Live distinction matters later when you place real orders, so it is worth getting into the habit of checking it here first.

Schwab is the one provider that does not take a typed key, because it uses a browser sign-in instead. For a Schwab profile you will see a Sign in button; activating it announces "Opening Schwab sign-in in browser", hands you off to Schwab's own login in your default browser, and on return confirms "Schwab sign-in complete for {name}".

Not every provider needs a key. Several crypto sources and the free historical archives chart happily with no credentials at all, so if you only want to study those you can skip this dialog entirely and go straight to the toolbar. The terminal will tell you, in the next step, on the rare occasion a key is actually missing — you do not have to memorise which providers need one.

Choosing what to chart

Everything you select to build a chart lives on the toolbar's second row, in the order the terminal needs it: Market, Provider, an optional Type, Symbol, and Time. There is no dedicated shortcut for these fields; you Tab into the toolbar and Tab through them left to right, and your screen reader reads each control's label and current value as you land on it.

These four selectors form a cascade — each choice decides what the next one can offer. Choosing the Market (for example Crypto, Stock, or Forex) refills the Provider list with the sources that cover that market and automatically selects the first of them. Choosing a Provider refills the Symbol list and the available timeframes and, again, selects the first symbol for you.

The Market list also holds one special entry, Analytics, which is where you chart data feeds rather than tradeable instruments. There is no longer a separate Trading/Analytics switch — picking Analytics in the Market dropdown is how you cross over. When you do, an extra Analytics type selector appears right after Market offering Economic, OnChain, Derivatives, and Sentiment; choose one and the Provider and Symbol lists refill with that category's sources (FRED economic series, on-chain metrics, funding/open-interest, Fear & Greed, and so on). For everything else — actual markets you can trade — you simply never touch the Analytics entry. One consequence worth understanding: moving through this cascade does not speak on its own — the terminal repopulates the dropdowns silently, and it is your screen reader, reading each list as you open it with the arrow keys, that tells you what is now available. So after picking a market, expect to arrow through the Provider and Symbol lists to hear and confirm your choices rather than waiting for an announcement.

Some providers split a market into a Type — most commonly Spot versus Futures on crypto exchanges. When that distinction applies, a Type selector appears between Provider and Symbol; when it does not, the field is simply absent and the Tab order closes up around it.

The Symbol list is a standard dropdown rather than a search box. Open it and type the first letters of a ticker to jump to it — typing "B" then "T" walks you toward BTC pairs, for instance — exactly as you would in any list your screen reader knows. This is also where a missing credential surfaces: if the provider you picked requires a key you have not configured, the Symbol list contains a single entry reading "⚠ API key required — open API Keys (Alt+K)", and the Load button stays disabled until you go back and add one. That sentinel is the terminal's way of pointing you to Alt+K at exactly the moment it matters.

Time is two controls working together: a multiplier you type (1 to 999) and a unit you choose — min, hr, day, wk, or mo. Together they read as a timeframe such as 1 hr or 15 min; the default is 1 hr. When a provider advertises a set of common timeframes, quick-pick buttons appear alongside the two fields so you can jump straight to, for example, "Set timeframe to 1h" without touching the multiplier.

A worked path makes the cascade concrete. Suppose you want Bitcoin against the dollar on Binance at the hourly. Tab to Market and select Crypto; the Provider list fills and lands on Binance. Tab to Provider and confirm Binance (or arrow to another exchange). Tab past the Type field — leaving it on Spot — to Symbol, open the list, type "BTC" to reach BTC/USDT, and select it. The Time field is already 1 hr, so you are done choosing. Because the cascade pre-selected sensible firsts, a common shortcut is to pick only the market, glance through to confirm the provider and symbol it chose for you, and load that.

Loading the chart

With a symbol chosen, Tab to the Load button and activate it. The terminal announces "Loading history…", interrupting whatever was being said, while it fetches the most recent bars. When the data is in and the chart is built, it announces the full identity of what you are now looking at — "{Symbol} on {Provider}, {Timeframe}. Ready.", for example "BTC/USDT on Binance, 1h. Ready." — again interrupting so you hear it immediately. That "Ready." is your cue that the chart is populated and every navigation and playback command in the rest of this manual is now live.

If the fetch fails — a bad or inactive key, a provider outage, an unsupported symbol — you hear "Chart failed to load." instead, and the toolbar shows a matching error such as "Chart load failed. Check provider settings." The usual fixes are to confirm the right profile is active (Alt+K) and that the symbol is one the provider actually serves.

At any later moment you can re-hear what is loaded without touching the toolbar: press F4 and the terminal announces the current symbol, provider, and timeframe. This is handy after you have been deep in navigation for a while and want to reconfirm the instrument before acting on it.

Knowing whether your data is live

A loaded chart is not automatically a live one. After the "Ready." announcement the terminal keeps working in the background: it fills in any gap between the history it fetched and the present moment, and then, if the provider streams, it switches to receiving real-time ticks. There is no separate "you are live now" banner, so the terminal tells you in the language it uses everywhere else — sound and speech.

The clearest signal is a closing bar. Once a live stream is running, each time the current bar closes and a new one opens you hear a short bell and an announcement in the shape "Close {price}. {pattern}. New bar: Open {price}." — for example "Close 42,500. Doji. New bar: Open 42,510." Those rolling new-bar announcements are the sound of a live feed; their arrival is your confirmation that data is flowing. (If you find them distracting you can switch them off in settings, so treat their presence, not their absence, as the positive signal.)

To check the live edge deliberately, press Backslash (\) to jump the cursor to the most recent bar. If you navigate forward past the end of the fetched data into time that has not happened yet, the terminal says "No live data yet", which tells you you have run off the end of what exists rather than that anything is wrong. A provider that offers only historical data — or a live connection that has not come up — simply never produces those new-bar bells; the chart stays perfectly usable for study, it just is not advancing on its own.

Switching markets later

You are not locked into your first choice. Return to the toolbar at any time, change any selector, and press Load again to replace the chart. One case is worth a heads-up: if you load an analytics provider — chosen through the Analytics entry in the Market dropdown, one that returns single scalar metrics like an economic series rather than OHLCV candles — onto a tab that already holds indicators or drawings, those tools cannot apply to a non-candle series, so the terminal stops to confirm with a "Switching to analytics" dialog. It offers three choices: "Continue (strip & load)" replaces the chart and removes the tools that no longer fit, "Open in New Tab" loads the analytics series beside your existing work and leaves it untouched, and "Cancel" backs out. When in doubt, open it in a new tab so you keep both views.

With a chart loaded and confirmed live, you are ready to read the market itself — which is where the next chapter, on moving through time bar by bar, begins.

Reading the Chart

A loaded chart is a structure you move through, not a picture you glance at. This chapter covers how you navigate that structure by keyboard, how you scan it for the moments that matter, how you play it back as sound, and how you control what you hear while you do. None of it requires sight; all of it is faster once the handful of movement keys are in your fingers.

The shape of a chart

The chart is a stack of panes, one above the next. The top pane is always the price itself — candlesticks by default. Below it sit indicator panes, one for each indicator that needs its own area; some indicators, like moving averages, instead draw directly on the price pane as overlays and never get a pane of their own.

Inside a pane the hierarchy continues. A pane holds one or more series, and a series holds one or more components. A MACD, for instance, is one series with three components — the MACD line, the signal line, and the histogram. Holding this three-level shape in mind — panes, series, components — is the key to moving around with confidence: you change panes one way, and components another, and the terminal always tells you where you have landed.

Moving through time

Left and Right arrow move the cursor one bar at a time — Left into the past, Right toward the present. As you land on each bar your screen reader announces its values: on the price pane, the open, high, low and close of that candle; on an indicator component, that component's reading for the bar. At the same time the sonification engine plays the bar's tone, so a run of Right-arrows is also a little rising or falling melody of where price went.

When you want to cover ground faster, Home jumps to the leftmost bar in view and End to the rightmost, while Backslash (\) leaps all the way to the latest, live bar. You can also move the window itself without moving the cursor: the bracket keys pan the viewport, with [ bringing older bars into view and ] newer ones, and Shift with either changes the pan step. The minus key zooms out to see more bars at once, and the equals key zooms in for finer detail on fewer.

If you prefer the mouse, the chart toolbar carries Pan left, Pan right, Zoom in, and Zoom out buttons that do exactly the same things and speak the new visible range just as the keys do, so they are safe to use with a screen reader. You can also click and drag the chart itself to pan — provided no drawing tool is selected — dragging right to reveal older bars; letting go of the button anywhere stops the pan.

Moving between panes and components

Page Down moves your focus to the next pane below, Page Up to the pane above; as you arrive, speech announces the newly focused series by name — "RSI", "Volume". Within a series, the Up and Down arrows step through its components: Down from the MACD line to the signal line to the histogram, Up back through them, each announced with its name and current value. When more panes are open than fit on screen, Alt+Up and Alt+Down scroll the pane list.

Two keys re-orient you whenever you lose the thread. F4 announces the current symbol, provider, and timeframe; Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C focuses the chart and reads a fuller context summary. Reach for them freely — there is no penalty for asking the terminal where you are.

Scanning for events

Stepping bar by bar is precise but slow when what you actually want is the next thing that happened. Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right are context-aware jumps that depend on what you have focused. On a price candle they jump to the previous or next bar where price crosses a trendline you have drawn. On an oscillator that crosses zero, like MACD, they jump to the next zero-crossing; on a banded oscillator like RSI, to the next entry into or exit from overbought or oversold; on a moving-average overlay, to the next price-versus-average cross; on a sparse signal marker, to the next bar where that signal fires. Press repeatedly to walk through every such event in turn; when there are no more in that direction the terminal says "No more {component} signals in this direction." It turns a long history into a short list of the moments worth hearing.

Playback: listening to the market

Playback is the core listening mode: the cursor animates through the visible window while the engine plays each bar's sound and your screen reader speaks its values, so you hear the shape of a stretch of market in seconds. Three keys set how much you hear. Space plays or stops the whole chart — every visible, unmuted series at once, each sounding all of its own visible, unmuted components together, so a busy chart really does play as a full ensemble, down to the soft cloud- and ribbon-fill washes (an EMA Fill between two averages, say) that used to drop out when too many voices were in play. Shift with Space plays just the series you have focused, all of its components, for studying one indicator without the rest. Ctrl+Shift+Space narrows further to a single component — the RSI line alone, say. Muting a series or component with M, or hiding it with H, drops it straight out of the mix, which is how you thin a crowded soundscape down to what matters. Ctrl+Space pauses and resumes whatever is playing — and while paused it now falls properly silent instead of holding the last chord, though the arrow keys still audition individual bars so you can inspect the frozen moment. Shift+Escape is the panic key that stops all playback at once, and Shift with the equals or minus keys speeds playback up or slows it down — slower to dwell on each bar, faster to scan a long history.

Choosing what you hear

You are always in command of the two output layers. F2 toggles speech on and off and F3 toggles the sonification engine, so you can run with numbers only, sound only, or both, to suit the task. Volume is adjustable at three depths: F5 and Shift+F5 raise and lower the focused component, F6 and Shift+F6 the whole focused series, and F7 and Shift+F7 the master chart volume — so you can bring one quiet line forward without touching the rest. The M key mutes or unmutes the focused series or component without removing it, and H hides or shows it; both are toggles, and both leave the data in place so you can bring it back with the same key.

Inspecting a single bar

When one bar deserves a thorough look before you act on it, press Ctrl+Shift+D (Alt+Shift+D on the Linux web host) for a full point analysis. It reads the candle's open, high, low, close and volume, names any candlestick pattern recognised at that bar — "Engulfing bullish" — reports every active indicator's reading there, and lists any signal events on the bar across all indicators. It is the one-key way to gather everything the terminal knows about a single moment, which is exactly what you want in front of a decision — and a natural lead-in to the analysis tools in the next chapter.

Analysis Tools

The chart is only the canvas. This chapter covers what you put on it to make sense of the market: indicators that compute and sonify their own readings, drawing tools you place by keyboard and then hear the cursor cross, the volume profile that maps where trading actually concentrated, and the heatmap that colours activity into the playback itself.

Adding and tuning indicators

Press Alt+A to open the Add Indicator dialog. Indicators are grouped into categories — Multi-Signal, Trend, Momentum, Volatility, Volume, and Profiles — and you move through the category and indicator lists with the arrow keys and add one with Enter. A new indicator arrives with audio properties already chosen for its type, so it is immediately playable; you can refine them later.

Once it is on the chart you reach it the same way you reach any pane — Page Down from the price pane until speech announces it — and explore its components with Up and Down, as the previous chapter described. Two small touches help here. Pressing 0 (zero) on a focused indicator adds a zero-level reference line, which both sounds during playback and gives Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right something to jump between. And when an indicator has outlived its use, Delete removes the focused pane after a spoken confirmation — the price pane itself cannot be removed.

To change how an indicator calculates or sounds, focus it and press P (or Shift+F12) for its properties dialog. There you adjust calculation parameters — periods, smoothing, thresholds — and, per component, the things that shape how it is heard: the waveform that colours its continuous tone, the bell patch that rings on its signal events, and its relative volume. A "Save as Defaults" option stores your preferences so the next indicator of that type starts already configured the way you like. Tab and the arrow keys move through the dialog and your screen reader reads every label and value.

Two whole-chart toggles live near the indicators. Alt+C switches the price pane to Heikin-Ashi candles, a smoothed formula that strips noise and can make a trend easier to hear; Alt+L switches to a logarithmic price scale, useful over long histories where price has moved by large percentages.

Drawing tools

Drawing tools place reference lines and shapes that then become audible as you navigate — the cursor will announce when it crosses a trendline you have set. Every tool uses sequential anchoring, which is what makes them fully keyboard- accessible: you do not hold and drag, and you do not press Enter. Instead you navigate the cursor to a point and press the tool's own shortcut to drop an anchor there; navigate to the next point and press the same shortcut again to set the next; and so on until the shape is complete. Escape cancels a drawing in progress.

Take a trendline (Ctrl+Shift+T) as the model. Arrow to the first point and press Ctrl+Shift+T — speech confirms "Trend line: anchor 1 set at {price}, {time}. Navigate to next point and press the shortcut again." Arrow to the second point, press it once more, and the line completes: "Trend line placed from {price} to {price}." Three-anchor tools — Fibonacci extension, Andrews' pitchfork, Risk/Reward — simply take a third press. Single-anchor tools — a horizontal price line, a vertical time marker, a text label, an anchored VWAP — finish on the first press, placing immediately at the cursor.

Linux web host: every Ctrl+Shift+<letter> drawing chord becomes Alt+Shift+<letter> in the browser, because the browser reserves the Ctrl+Shift versions. Same letter, same tool. The desktop and mobile apps use Ctrl+Shift as written, and the F1 help always shows the bindings live on your host.

The set spans Trendline (T), Horizontal and Vertical lines (H, V), Channel (C), Fibonacci retracement and extension (F, E), Text label (L), Rectangle (R), Measure (M), Andrews' pitchfork (A), Gann fan and box (G, B), Angle (J), Risk/Reward (P), and anchored VWAP (W); Alt+D opens a panel to review and delete what you have placed. A few behave specially. A Fibonacci retracement, anchored from a swing low to a swing high, lays down the standard 23.6, 38.2, 50, 61.8 and 78.6 percent levels, each audible as the cursor crosses it. An anchored VWAP behaves like a moving-average overlay you can focus and whose crossings you can jump between. And the Risk/Reward tool, after you set its entry and stop anchors, speaks the resulting risk and then asks for the target, announcing the full reward-to-risk ratio once you set it — the same measuring workflow described in the Trading chapter.

The volume profile

A volume profile is a different kind of view: instead of volume across time, it shows volume across price — a horizontal histogram revealing which price levels saw the most trading. When your focus is on a volume-profile series the Up and Down arrows change meaning: rather than stepping through components they move between price bins, Up to the next higher level and Down to the next lower, each announced with its price and the volume there. Left and Right still move the cursor through time as usual.

Two landmarks are worth listening for. The Point of Control — the single highest-volume price level — rings with a distinct square-wave tone and is announced "Point of Control" when you land on it. The Value Area, the band of prices that accounts for roughly seventy percent of all volume, announces "Entering Value Area" as you move into it and "Exiting Value Area" as you leave — so you can feel the edges of where the market agreed on price.

The heatmap

Alt+H toggles a volume heatmap over the price chart, shading each candle and time zone by how much trading happened there. Its real payoff is in sound: with the heatmap on, playback folds that intensity into the audio, so higher-volume bars play louder than quiet ones and a busy stretch of market is something you hear swell rather than something you have to look up. Press Alt+H again to turn it off.

The object tree

Once a chart has a few indicators and drawings on it, navigating to a particular one just to hide or remove it becomes a chore. The object tree, opened with Alt+O and announced as "Object Tree", is the manager's-eye view that solves that: a single tree of everything on the chart, laid out as the same panes → series → components hierarchy you move through on the chart itself, but as one list you can Tab and arrow through without disturbing the chart.

Each series in the tree reads itself the way you'd want — its name, how many components it has, and its current state — so you hear, for example, "RSI, one component, visible, audible, focused" as you move onto it. From there you act on any object in place, without first navigating to it on the chart: each series and each component has a toggle to hide or show it (the same effect as H) and a toggle to mute or unmute it (the same as M), and a series carries a Remove control to take it off the chart entirely. Selecting a series in the tree also focuses it back on the chart, so the panel doubles as a jump-to-anything: find the indicator in the list, activate it, and your chart cursor is now on it. When the soundscape is getting crowded, this is the quickest place to find the one series cluttering it and silence or remove it. A button at the top also jumps straight to the Strategy manager.

AI, Narration, and the Journal

Three features sit between reading the chart yourself and acting on it: an AI analyst you can ask for a second opinion, an auto-narrator that watches a series and speaks up when something happens, and the Journal that quietly records everything the terminal has said so nothing scrolls past for good. All three chords use three modifiers and so are not remapped on the web host — they are the same everywhere.

The AI technical analyst

Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+A to open the AI Analyst. It gathers a snapshot of what you are looking at — the current symbol and timeframe, the most recent candles, a summary of every indicator you have on the chart, and, where the provider supports vision, an actual image of the chart — sends it to a large language model, and reads back a concise, plain-language technical analysis written for text-to-speech: trend direction, the key support and resistance levels, what momentum is doing, and a short-term outlook. Think of it as a second pair of eyes on demand — a narrative framing of the same structure you have been navigating bar by bar, in one paragraph you can take in at listening speed.

It is worth being clear about what it is and is not. It describes the chart; it does not advise you and it cannot place a trade — there is no button in it that touches your account. And because the answer is generated, it can be wrong: treat it as informed commentary to weigh against what you heard yourself navigating, not as a signal to act on. Used that way — as a sanity check on the read you already formed — it earns its place.

The natural way to use it is to set the scene first. Load the symbol and timeframe you care about, add the indicators you want it to consider, navigate enough to have your own opinion, and then press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+A — because it analyses the chart as it stands at that moment, the more you have set up, the more grounded its answer. A useful habit is to ask twice: get its read on the daily, switch the timeframe to the hourly (or add an indicator you suspect matters), and run it again to hear how the framing changes. A typical reply sounds like this:

"Bitcoin, four-hour. The trend is up but stretching — price is roughly eight percent above the fifty-period moving average and RSI is at seventy-three, in overbought. The nearest support is the prior breakout around sixty-one thousand five hundred; resistance is the recent high near sixty-four thousand two hundred. Momentum is still positive but the MACD histogram is shrinking, which often precedes a pause. Short-term outlook: constructive but extended — a pullback toward the moving average would be normal and would not break the uptrend."

It needs a key. Add one for at least one provider in the API key manager (Alt+K); the terminal tries the providers it knows in order — Claude, then OpenAI, then Ollama — and uses the first you have configured. If none is set up, the Analyst tells you so rather than failing silently. The choice of provider is partly a privacy choice. Claude and OpenAI are cloud services and are vision-capable, so they get the richest input — but your chart snapshot, image included, leaves your machine to reach them. Ollama runs a model locally on your own computer, so nothing leaves the device at all; it is the right pick when you would rather your data stay home, at the cost of running a smaller model and installing it yourself. Either way, remember that a cloud request both shares your chart data and usually costs a small amount per call, so it is a deliberate action, not something to lean on every bar.

Auto-narration and live announcements

Where the AI Analyst is something you ask, auto-narration is something you switch on and forget. Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+N to toggle it on for the series you have focused, and from then on the terminal watches that one indicator and speaks new events as they occur on live bar closes — a fresh signal firing, or the oscillator entering or leaving an overbought or oversold zone. You will hear short, plain announcements as they happen: "RSI overbought", "MACD bullish crossover", "Stochastic leaving oversold". It announces only what happens after you switch it on; it does not replay the history you already navigated. And because it is per-series, you can leave it running on the one indicator you care about and not be interrupted by the rest of the chart — set it on your RSI, say, and get on with reading price while the terminal keeps half an ear on momentum for you. Toggling it announces the new state, "Narration on" or "Narration off", so you always know whether it is listening. On the Linux web host the chord is unchanged — it has three modifiers, which browsers do not reserve.

Auto-narration is one of a small family of "let the terminal keep you posted" features worth knowing together. The rolling new-bar announcement — the "Close … New bar …" you met when you first loaded a market — is the always-on heartbeat of the live candle, and you can turn it on or off under Settings (F12) with "Announce new bars". The detailed point analysis, Ctrl+Shift+D (Alt+Shift+D on the web host), is the on-demand deep read of whichever bar you are sitting on — candle values, patterns, every indicator, every signal, in one keystroke, covered back in the chart chapter. And the context summary, F4 for a quick "symbol, provider, timeframe" and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C for the fuller picture, tells you where you are at any moment. Between them you can run as hands-off or as hands-on as you like: narration and new-bar announcements stream the live market to you, while Ctrl+Shift+D and the AI Analyst are there the moment you want to stop and look hard at something.

The Journal

The Journal, opened with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+J, is the terminal's memory of the session. Everything it has spoken or alerted — ordinary speech, alerts, strategy setups, errors, and backtest results — is written here, newest at the bottom, up to a couple of thousand entries. It is the primary way to recover something that went by in speech while you were concentrating elsewhere: a fill you half-heard, an alert that fired mid-thought, the exact wording of an error.

The view is a plain monospace text area you can Tab into to read or copy any line, with filter buttons — All, Speech, Alerts, Setups, Errors, Backtests — to narrow it to just the kind of entry you are after, and a "Copy visible" button to lift the current selection out to paste elsewhere. Automated-strategy setups land here in full, with their rationale spelled out — side, score, stop price, first target, reward-to-risk, and the notes on where the stop was placed — so the Journal doubles as the record of what your strategies proposed and why. When in doubt about what the terminal just told you, this is where you go to read it back at your own pace.

Trading

Everything to do with money — placing orders, attaching protective exits, watching positions and fills, and reading the live order book — runs through the trading dashboard, which you open with Alt+T. Your screen reader announces it as "Trading Dashboard". It gathers four things in one place: the market you are trading and its environment, an order ticket, a five-level order book snapshot, and a row of account tabs — Balances, Positions, Orders, and History. This chapter assumes you already know what market, limit, stop, and trailing orders are, and concentrates on how you express and hear those decisions here, and on what the terminal does and does not do on your behalf.

Practise first: paper trading

Before risking a cent, turn on paper trading mode and learn the whole workflow against simulated money. Open Settings with F12, and on the General tab tick "Paper trading mode"; the terminal confirms "Paper trading enabled" and a small paper indicator appears in the status bar (announced as "Paper trading enabled"). From then on, every order you place — on any chart, with any provider — is routed to a built-in simulator instead of a real exchange. Fills are driven by the real live price of the chart you are watching: a market order fills at the current price, and a stop, target, or trailing order fills the moment live price action actually crosses it. You start with a virtual balance, the account persists between sessions, and a "Reset paper account" button on the same settings tab wipes it back to the starting balance whenever you want a clean slate. While paper mode is on the dashboard shows the environment as "Paper (simulated)" with a paper banner, and the red live-funds banner is suppressed. Everything described in the rest of this chapter behaves identically in paper and live — so practise here until the spoken feedback is second nature, then switch a real key in.

On the hosted web terminal (the logged-in, multi-user build) this choice is made for you: paper trading is always on and cannot be switched off, so pressing Alt+T always opens a paper dashboard and you can never place a real-money order from the browser. Real trading with your own broker keys is a desktop-app feature. (If you tried this on an earlier build and got "provider does not support trading," that was the bug this behaviour fixes — the web providers are data-only, and orders now correctly route to the paper simulator.)

Paper or live — check this first

When you are not in paper mode, your environment follows whichever API key profile is active. A profile marked Paper points at the provider's own sandbox; a profile marked Live trades real, funded money. The dashboard shows the current environment in its market panel, and when you are on a live profile it puts an unmissable red banner across the top of the controls — "⚠ LIVE TRADING — Real funds at risk." — that stays on screen the whole time.

You can change accounts without leaving the dashboard: the "Switch API Key" dropdown lists your profiles as "{name} ({environment})", and selecting one announces "Switched to API key {name} ({environment})" and reloads that account's balances and positions. Build the habit of confirming this out loud before a session — it is the single most consequential setting on the screen.

Placing an order

The order ticket lives in the dashboard's "Place Order" panel and reshapes itself to the order you are building, so you only ever Tab past fields that apply. You choose a side with the big round green "BUY" and red "SELL" buttons — they are a toggle, so exactly one is active and your screen reader reports which is pressed — then enter a "Quantity" and pick a "Type".

The Type list holds the full set: Market, Limit, Stop-Market, Stop-Limit, Take-Profit-Market, and Take-Profit-Limit. The fields that appear depend on it. The stop and take-profit types reveal a "Trigger Price" — the level at which the order activates. The limit-style types (Limit, Stop-Limit, Take-Profit-Limit) reveal a "Limit Price" and, with it, a "Time in force" choice of GTC, IOC, or FOK and a "Post-only (maker)" checkbox. A plain market order fills at the prevailing price and needs neither.

On a market or limit entry you also get the protective and sizing controls described in the next two sections — Stop Loss, Take Profit, trailing exits, and a risk sizer. And if your provider supports margin or futures, the ticket adds a "Margin" choice (Cross or Isolated), a "Leverage" multiplier, a "Position side" (One-way, Long, or Short, for hedge accounts), and a "Reduce-only" checkbox. Controls the active provider does not support are simply not shown — so the same ticket is lean on a spot exchange and full on a futures one.

Two helpers worth knowing before you submit. The Size button next to "Risk % of balance" does position-sizing for you: enter a risk percentage and a stop, and it sets the quantity so that being stopped out costs you that share of your balance, announcing "Sized {quantity} from {n} percent risk." And a double-tap guard ignores an identical order resubmitted within thirty seconds, so a stray second press will not double your size.

Protecting a trade: stops, targets, and trailing exits

You protect a trade at the moment you enter it. On a market or limit entry the ticket offers an optional "Stop Loss" and "Take Profit", both entered as absolute price levels — buy at 42,500 and you might type 42,180 to stop out and 43,400 to bank profit. Leave either blank to skip it.

When you would rather your exit follow the trade, use a trailing stop or a trailing take-profit (shown when the provider supports trailing). The "Trailing stop" selector lets you trail by Percent or by Amount; enter a distance and the terminal keeps a stop that ratchet toward the trade as price moves your way and never loosens, firing only on a reversal of that distance. The "Trailing take-profit" works the same way but adds an optional "TP activation price": it stays dormant until price reaches that level, then arms and trails from there, so it locks in profit only after a target is reached. In paper mode you can watch both work tick by tick.

Two cautions carry over from real exchanges. First, an entry and its protective orders are not placed as one guaranteed bracket: the terminal submits the entry, then the protection, then about two seconds later checks that protection actually landed — and if it cannot find it, warns you, interrupting, "Warning: no stop loss or take profit found on the exchange for {symbol}. The position may be unprotected — verify your open orders." Treat that as a call to action. Second, there is no inline editor for a resting order's protective levels; to move a stop you cancel it on the Orders tab and place a new one. Set your exits deliberately at entry.

The live order review

Paper orders submit the instant you activate the submit button. Live orders do not — they get a spoken safety review first. When you submit on a live profile, the terminal speaks a one-line summary — "Confirm: {side} {qty} {symbol}, {type}. Stop {price}. Target {price}. Estimated cost {amount}, fee {amount}. Confirm or cancel." — and replaces the submit button with Confirm and Cancel. Nothing reaches the exchange until you activate Confirm; Cancel backs out with "Order canceled before submit." It is the deliberate pause that a real-money order deserves, and it is on automatically whenever you are live.

Hearing your fills

Order outcomes are the one kind of feedback the terminal will never let you miss. Whatever else is happening — sonification muted, a playback running, speech mid- sentence — an order event plays a short earcon immediately and then speaks over whatever was being said. The announcements are plain, quantity-and-price first, and on a closing fill they add the realized result:

• Placed: "Order placed. {Buy|Sell} {qty} {symbol}, {type}."
• A complete fill: "Order filled. Bought {qty} {symbol} at {price}." — and on a close, "… Profit {amount}." or "… Loss {amount}."
• A partial fill: "Partial fill. … {remaining} remaining."
• A fixed stop or target: "Stop loss hit. Sold {qty} {symbol} at {price}. Loss {amount}." / "Take profit hit. … Profit {amount}."
• A trailing exit: "Trailing stop hit. …" / "Trailing take profit hit. …", with the same price and profit/loss.
• A cancel: "Order canceled. {symbol}." A refusal: "Order rejected for {symbol}."

Order IDs are never spoken — they are meaningless to the ear. Every one of these events is also written to the Journal (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+J), so a fill that goes by while you are concentrating elsewhere can be read back afterward. (Realized profit and loss are spoken on every paper close; on a live exchange they appear when the exchange reports them.)

Positions, orders, balances, and history

The lower part of the dashboard carries four tabs — Balances, Positions, Orders, and History — and switching to one speaks its name and count, like "Positions, 2".

• Positions lists each open position with its quantity, average price, value, unrealized profit or loss, leverage, and liquidation price, and gives each a Close button that flattens it with an opposing market order — so exiting is now a single action, announced as "Closing {symbol}. …".
• Orders lists your working, not-yet-filled orders — side, type, quantity, price, status — each with a Cancel button to pull a resting limit or protective stop.
• History is your fill log, newest first: time, symbol, side, quantity, price, realized profit or loss, and fee — the place to review how a session actually went.
• Balances shows your free and locked funds per asset.

Reading the order book

Press Alt+B to open the order book for the current symbol; your screen reader announces it as "Order Book — {symbol}". It presents the resting buy and sell interest as two columns — "Bids (Buy Orders)" and "Asks (Sell Orders)" — each listing up to twenty price levels with their size and a running cumulative total, under a summary line giving the best bid, best ask, and the spread as both a number and a percent (for example "1.50 (0.004%)").

You read the book by Tab: every price level is focusable, and landing on one is announced as "Bid {price}, size {quantity}" or "Ask {price}, size {quantity}", so you can walk down the bids to feel where demand thins out or up the asks to find a wall of supply. If your provider streams the book it updates live as you read; otherwise a "Refresh" button pulls a fresh snapshot. It updates quietly rather than narrating every change, so it is a place you go to read depth deliberately.

A trade from start to finish

Putting it together, in paper mode: you are watching BTC/USDT on Binance and decide to buy a pullback. You press Alt+T, hear "Paper (simulated)", and Tab through the ticket — BUY, quantity 0.5, type Market, stop loss 42,180, and a Trailing take-profit of 1.5 percent with an activation at 43,000. You activate "Submit Buy Order"; because you are in paper it places at once, and you hear the earcon and "Order filled. Bought 0.5 BTC/USDT at 42,500." Price climbs through 43,000, arming the trailing take-profit, and then pulls back: "Trailing take profit hit. Sold 0.5 BTC/USDT at 43,260. Profit 380.00." You open the History tab and the trade is there with its price, profit, and fee. Had price instead fallen to 42,180 first, you would have heard "Stop loss hit. Sold 0.5 BTC/USDT at 42,180. Loss 160.00." — and either way, when you want out early, the Close button on the Positions tab flattens you with one press.

Automation

Three features let the terminal watch and act so you do not have to stare at every bar: alerts that speak up when a condition you set is met, strategies that evaluate a rule set and propose (or place) trades, and custom scripts that let you bring your own indicator logic. The strategy tools are research instruments — treat them as exploratory, as the in-app banner says — but the alerts are an everyday convenience.

Alerts

Press Alt+J for the alerts manager. The top of the dialog is a short form for adding one: a Name (the placeholder suggests "e.g. Price crosses 50000"), a Target of Price, Candle, Indicator, or POC, a Condition — crosses above, crosses below, enters a zone, exits a zone, or changes direction — a Price Level to test against, and a Delivery choice of Speech, Earcon, or Both. Fill it in and activate "Add Alert"; the alert joins the "Active Alerts" list above, where each shows its name, target, condition, and level with a Delete button. There is no separate edit step — to change an alert, delete it and add a new one.

When an alert fires it reaches you immediately. Per its Delivery setting it speaks, interrupting whatever is being said — "{name}: crossed above {level}. Current value {value}." — and/or plays an alert earcon, and the event is written to the Journal so you can read it back. Alerts are never gated by your speech or sonification toggles — a condition you asked to be told about will always tell you. If you have set up email or Telegram in Settings (under the alerts options), fired alerts are sent there too, so you can be notified away from the keyboard.

Strategies

Press Alt+S for the Strategy Manager — labelled EXPERIMENTAL, with the standing caveat that backtested results do not guarantee live performance. It opens on a row of tabs: Library (your saved strategies, each with Start/Stop), Build Setup (the composer), Active (running strategies, with Pause/Resume), Backtest, and Custom Script.

To build one, the Build Setup tab gives the strategy a Name and a Side (Long or Short), then a condition tree you assemble from "+ Group" (AND/OR/NOT) and "+ Leaf" buttons — each leaf picks an indicator, an operator, and the component to test, with an optional timeframe for multi-timeframe rules. Beneath it a risk plan sets the stop source (a percent of price, an ATR multiple, below a swing low, or a fixed price), a take-profit ladder of one or more rungs, and a stop buffer. Adding the finished setup to the engine marks it to re-load on the next launch, so your strategies survive a restart.

A running strategy talks to you as its state changes. When its conditions line up it rings a setup bell and speaks the rationale — "Long setup, score 0.85. Stop 49,500, first target 51,000 (R:R 2.50). {why}." — and if the entry is conditional you will hear it arm ("waiting for {trigger}") and then report when the trigger is reached. While the setup holds it heartbeats a quieter reconfirmation, and if a condition drops away it names what fell off. It also tells you when it is not yet ready: "indicators warming up — {n} of {m} bars loaded. Signals begin once warm." Every one of these lands in the Journal's Setups filter for review.

The Backtest tab runs a strategy over history with realistic settings — starting capital, commission, slippage, and a warm-up period you can auto-detect — over an optional date range, including one-press "first half / last half" buttons for walk-forward testing. Run it and the results read back as trade count, win rate, total P&L, max drawdown, Sharpe ratio, and an expandable trade log of each entry, exit, and reason. Because the whole feature is experimental, read those numbers as a study of the rules, not a promise.

Custom scripts

When the built-in indicator set doesn't have the one you want, you can write your own. Press Alt+Comma for the Custom Scripts panel. If you can write a little C# — or you have a PineScript indicator from elsewhere — you can add an indicator that behaves, and sounds, like any of the built-ins. This section walks through writing one from scratch; deeper authoring (multi-output indicators, full control over how each output is voiced, or packaging a compiled plugin) is covered in the SDK guide and docs/PLUGIN_AUTHORING.md.

What a custom indicator is. Under the hood every indicator is a small class that takes the price history and returns one or more arrays of numbers — one number per bar, per line it draws. Your script implements a contract called ICustomIndicator, which is just six things: an Id (a short stable code), a DisplayName (what you'll hear it called in the indicator list), the ComponentNames (one name per output line), the DisplayTypes (how each line is drawn — and, importantly, how it is heard), a set of DefaultParameters, and a Calculate method that does the maths. The panel pre-fills a commented skeleton of exactly these members when you start a new script, so you are never staring at a blank page.

Two of those deserve a word, because they are where accessibility lives. The DisplayTypes you choose are not only about drawing — they decide the sound. Declare a line as an Oscillator and the terminal voices it around its zero line, so you hear it cross from negative to positive without reading a number; declare it as a Dot or Arrow and it becomes a sparse marker you can jump between with Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right. And the DefaultParameters you expose show up in the indicator's Properties dialog (P), so you — or anyone you share the script with — can retune the period or a threshold later without editing code.

A worked example. Here is a complete, working custom indicator: a Rate-of-Change oscillator that measures how far price has moved, as a percentage, over the last n bars.

public class RateOfChange : ICustomIndicator
{
    public string Id => "ROC_CUSTOM";
    public string DisplayName => "Rate of Change";

    // One output line, drawn — and voiced — as an oscillator around zero.
    public string[] ComponentNames => new[] { "ROC" };
    public ComponentDisplayType[] DisplayTypes => new[] { ComponentDisplayType.Oscillator };

    // Appears in the Properties dialog (P), so the period is tunable without code.
    public Dictionary<string, double> DefaultParameters => new() { ["Period"] = 14 };

    public double[][] Calculate(ReadOnlySpan<Ohlcv> data, Dictionary<string, double> p)
    {
        int period = (int)p["Period"];
        var roc = new double[data.Length];
        for (int i = 0; i < data.Length; i++)
        {
            // No value until there are `period` earlier bars to compare against —
            // NaN tells the chart "nothing here yet" so warm-up bars stay silent.
            if (i < period) { roc[i] = double.NaN; continue; }
            double prior = data[i - period].Close;
            roc[i] = prior == 0 ? double.NaN : (data[i].Close - prior) / prior * 100.0;
        }
        return new[] { roc };   // one array per component name, each the length of `data`
    }
}

A few rules the example shows: Calculate receives the full history, oldest bar first; it must return one array per name in ComponentNames, and each array must be the same length as the input; and any bar you can't compute yet — the warm-up at the start — should be double.NaN, which the terminal treats as "no value" and skips in both the drawing and the sound. An indicator with two lines (say a value and a signal) just returns two arrays and lists two ComponentNames and two DisplayTypes.

The workflow. Press "+ New", give the script a name, and write or paste your class into the editor. "Save" keeps it in your library. Activating Compile builds it in the sandbox and tells you the result — "Compiled successfully. Indicator: Rate of Change" when it builds, or a read-aloud list of the compiler errors when it doesn't, so you can fix them and try again. Once it compiles, "+ Add to Chart" drops it onto the chart as its own pane, and from that moment it is an indicator like any other: Page Down to it, Up and Down through its components, set its waveform and bell in Properties (P), hear it in playback, and jump its signals with Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right. "Export .atpkg" packages the script to a single file you can share or back up.

Bringing in someone else's script. The Import controls take an .atpkg file from disk or pasted JSON. Because that is code from outside, the terminal treats it as untrusted and asks first — "Import untrusted script '{name}'? … It will be sandboxed, but review the code before pressing Compile." — so you always get a chance to read what you're about to run. It is imported but not compiled until you choose to; read the source first.

From PineScript. If you have a PineScript v5 indicator, paste it into the "Transpile from Pine Script v5" box and press Transpile. The terminal converts it to C# you can then review and Compile, reporting "Transpiled to C# — review and compile." and listing any conversion warnings. It handles a practical subset of Pine rather than the whole language, so always read the generated C# and check the warnings before relying on it.

The sandbox, and one platform limit. Compiling and running a custom script never endangers the rest of the terminal: the code runs in an isolated worker process with no file, network, or reflection access, limited to the charting and indicator libraries, and on Windows, macOS, Android, and Linux that worker is additionally locked down by the operating system itself. The one exception is iOS, which provides no such sandbox, so custom-script compilation is disabled there — the editor still works as a text editor, it just can't run; use the Windows, macOS, or Linux build for scripting. The full design is in docs/SANDBOX_DESIGN.md.

Customizing

The terminal is meant to be shaped to how you work and what you can hear. This chapter covers the three places you do that shaping: the settings dialog for global preferences, the sound designer for the audio palette, and tabs and workspaces for arranging and saving your charts.

Settings

Press F12 for the settings dialog, organised into sections you Tab through. The general preferences mirror the toggles you also reach by hotkey — speech on or off, sonification on or off — and add the smaller choices that tune how much the terminal says: whether it speaks timestamps, whether it reads column headers, and whether it announces each new bar as it closes (the rolling "Close … New bar …" you met when you first loaded a market). It is also where you switch paper trading mode on, and where, on the desktop heads, you set the audio engine's latency. An appearance section sets the theme and chart colours — most relevant to a sighted collaborator looking over your shoulder — and an alerts section holds the email and Telegram delivery details that let fired alerts reach you away from the keyboard. Changes apply when you close the dialog.

The sound designer

Two layers of audio control sit underneath settings. The first is each indicator's properties dialog (P). Its Sonification tab has an Acoustics section for the component you pick there, and at the top of it a Sound Patch dropdown chooses the voice that component plays — any built-in patch (the bells and more) or any patch you have made yourself — with a ▶ Preview button beside it to hear it. Components that are coloured green for up and red for down — candles, bars, volume and other histograms, and anything polarity-coloured — additionally get Green (bullish) patch and Red (bearish) patch dropdowns, so rising bars and falling bars can sound different; plain lines and areas show only the single patch. Leave a patch unset and the older manual controls — waveform, noise, volume — take over as a fallback, and "Save as Defaults" still makes your choices stick for the next indicator of that type.

The second layer is the sound designer, opened with Alt+W, where the patches themselves are built. It is now a general-purpose patch workbench rather than an earcon-only panel. A single patch can stack several oscillators, each with its own waveform (sine, square, sawtooth, triangle, or noise), level in the mix, frequency ratio (a harmonic multiple of the patch's base pitch — 2.0 is an octave up), and noise blend and noise colour (pink, white, or brown); the "Add Oscillator" button layers on another. A Mix section sets the base frequency, a frequency multiplier, and overall volume; an Envelope section chooses a sustained tone or a plucked Ping and its duration. The Preview button auditions the whole patch — noise and envelope included, not just the bare waveform as before. A patch you build here can be assigned to event earcons in this same panel, or to indicator components through the properties dialog above, and the link is live: edit a patch in the sound designer and every component and earcon using it updates at once. Patches saved by older versions still load unchanged. Think of the properties dialog as choosing which instrument each part plays and the sound designer as building the instruments.

Tabs and workspaces

You can keep several charts open at once in tabs. Ctrl+T opens a new chart tab, Ctrl+W closes the current one, and Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab move to the next and previous tab — so you might hold BTC on the hourly in one tab and a stock index on the daily in another, and flip between them without reloading. A row of tabs sits just above the chart and is always visible, even when only one tab is open, so the "+" new-tab button is always there for the mouse. (On the Linux web host the browser claims Ctrl+T, Ctrl+W, and Ctrl+Tab for its own tabs, so there they are replaced: press Alt+Shift+N to open a new chart tab, and press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+T to move keyboard focus onto the tab switcher bar. Once the bar has focus, switch with the left/right arrow keys, Home and End, or the number row (1–9 jump straight to that tab); press Insert to open another tab and Delete to close the focused one. The bar is an ARIA tablist, so your screen reader announces each tab as you move. See the Platform Support chapter.)

A whole arrangement — every tab, its symbol and timeframe, its indicators and drawings — is a workspace you can save and restore. Ctrl+Alt+Shift+W saves the current workspace and Ctrl+Alt+W loads one back; because those are three-modifier chords the browser does not reserve them, so they work the same on every platform. Set up the charts and indicators you return to every session once, save them, and you are one shortcut from that whole layout the next time you sit down.

The Tactile Display

Alongside speech and sound, Accessible Trader can drive a refreshable tactile graphics display — a pad of pins that rise and fall so you can read the shape of the chart with your fingers. The supported device is the Dot Pad (second generation): a grid of thirty by ten graphic cells — sixty by forty individual pins — with a separate twenty-cell braille text strip beneath it. Tactile output does not replace the speech and the soundscape; it is a third layer you read at the same time, and it is the one that gives you the chart's form directly under your hand rather than as pitch over time.

Tactile support is a Windows feature today, because the device's graphics need the vendor's Windows driver; the Linux web host can't drive the pins yet (the vendor's Linux library has no graphics support — see the project docs for the current state).

Turning it on

Tactile output is off until you ask for it. Open Settings with F12 and, on the General tab, tick "Enable braille / tactile display output." With it on, the terminal looks for a connected Dot Pad as it starts, and keeps watching while it runs — so you can plug the display in at any time and hear it announce itself, "Dot Pad connected," and unplug it to hear "Dot Pad disconnected." Turning the setting back off stops all of this and skips device detection entirely. The toggle is deliberately opt-in: looking for the display means probing serial ports, which is the sort of thing you only want happening when you actually have one.

Reading the chart by touch

When a chart is loaded the pad shows it as two stacked panes — the focused series and the one above it in the cycle — with candles drawn as a body, a wick, and a gap so the bars are distinct under your fingers, and indicators drawn as the line, oscillator, or markers their type calls for. Beneath the graphic, the twenty-cell strip carries the live value of wherever your cursor is, switching for about a second and a half to the bar's timestamp each time you move with the left or right arrow before falling back to the value.

The graphic redraws when you navigate — change focus, switch panes, zoom, pan — but deliberately not on every live tick. Each tactile frame takes a second or two of physical pin movement, faster than ticks arrive, so redrawing on every tick would leave the pad permanently in motion and unreadable. The stable graphic stays put under your hand while the fast-moving live value rides on the strip, which is the right surface for it. Before any chart is loaded the pad reads "accessible trade terminal ready" and the strip "no chart loaded…".

The device keys

The Dot Pad's own four function keys and its panning keys are wired into the terminal so you can keep both hands on the pad. F1 speaks the focused series — "candles" for the price pane, or the indicator's name. F2 speaks the focused component within it. F3 speaks the chart's identity — symbol, timeframe, and provider. F4 freezes the graphic so you can study a frame without it redrawing under you, and frees it again on a second press; the strip keeps updating either way. The display's pan keys scroll the chart left and right exactly as the [ and ] keys do. Each of the function-key answers is also written to the braille strip, so you can read what F1 to F3 reported as well as hear it.

Setting up the hardware itself — installing the Dot Pad SDK, the supported connection, and calibration — is covered in the project's platform documentation rather than here.

Platform Support

Accessible Trader runs two ways: as a native desktop and mobile app on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android, and as a self-hosted browser application — the Linux web host — that you reach in a browser such as Firefox. The keyboard navigation, the Hybrid Voice model, and everything in the preceding chapters are the same everywhere; what differs is the plumbing underneath and a single block of keyboard shortcuts on the web host.

• Windows — works with NVDA, JAWS, and Narrator; uses the WASAPI audio engine for the lowest latency; needs a full hardware keyboard for the shortcuts. The Windows build is also the one that drives a Dot Pad tactile display when one is connected.
• macOS — works with VoiceOver, uses the AVAudioEngine audio path, full keyboard support.
• Android — works with TalkBack and the AudioTrack engine; the keyboard shortcuts are available when a physical keyboard is connected.
• iOS — works with VoiceOver and AVAudioEngine; shortcuts require a connected hardware keyboard, and, as the Automation chapter noted, custom-script compilation is disabled because iOS provides no process sandbox.
• Linux (web host, in a browser) — works with Orca and other browser-compatible screen readers, with audio routed to your system through PipeWire or PulseAudio (or, on a remote/demo deployment, streamed to the browser).

Which version to use

The native app and the web host are not rivals so much as two doors into the same terminal, and which one you want is mostly decided by your operating system. On Windows and macOS, use the native app — it gives you the deepest integration: the lowest-latency native audio, a chart that redraws at full speed, and your credentials held in the operating system's own keychain. On Linux, use the web host — there is no native Linux build, and the web host is an excellent first-class client, speaking through Orca and playing through PipeWire or PulseAudio; it is also what powers the public chart demo on the website. And on a phone or tablet, the native app is the only option — there is no way to put the web host in your pocket.

Two capabilities tip the balance toward the native Windows app in particular. The tactile display described in the previous chapter is Windows-only, so a Dot Pad user wants that build. And the safety sandbox for custom scripts is fullest on the native desktop platforms. Everything else — every chart, indicator, drawing tool, alert, strategy, trade, and the whole Hybrid Voice model — works the same on both, so if you move between a Windows desktop and a Linux laptop you are using the same terminal in both places, with only the plumbing underneath and the one block of shortcuts below changing.

The web host modifier remap

The one place the keyboard genuinely differs is the browser. Firefox and most browsers reserve several Ctrl+Shift+<letter> chords for themselves — Ctrl+Shift+T reopens a closed tab, Ctrl+Shift+P opens a private window, and so on — and a web page cannot override them. So on the web host every Ctrl+Shift+<letter> chord is remapped to Alt+Shift+<letter>: the same letter and the same command, just a different modifier. This affects all the drawing tools and the detailed point summary (Ctrl+Shift+D becomes Alt+Shift+D). Chords with three modifiers — the AI Analyst, auto-narration, the Journal, save and load workspace — are not remapped, because browsers do not reserve them. A few single-Ctrl chords are reserved by the browser at an even deeper level — it acts on them before the page ever sees the keystroke, so they cannot be cancelled in-page at all. On the web host these are dropped from the bindings (so the Help dialog never lists a chord the browser eats) and the action moves elsewhere: open a new tab with Alt+Shift+N or the tab bar's + button instead of Ctrl+T; close a tab with its × button or by focusing the bar and pressing Delete instead of Ctrl+W; switch tabs by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+T (a three-modifier chord browsers leave alone) to focus the tab switcher bar, then the arrow keys, Home/End, the number row, Insert (new) or Delete (close) instead of Ctrl+Tab; and jump between indicator sub-panes with Alt+PageUp / Alt+PageDown instead of Ctrl+PageUp / Ctrl+PageDown, which the browser uses to cycle its own tabs. You never have to memorise which is which — the Help dialog (F1) always lists the bindings actually in effect on the host you are using, so it self-documents per platform.

Glossary

Brief definitions of the terms used throughout this manual, in alphabetical order. They are deliberately short — enough to keep you moving if a word in a chapter was unfamiliar, not a substitute for a course in the markets themselves.

Anchored VWAP. A VWAP (see VWAP) calculated forward from one bar you choose, rather than from the start of the session.

Ask. The lowest price a seller is currently willing to accept. The counterpart to the bid; the gap between them is the spread.

Bar / Candle. One unit of the chart, summarising price over one timeframe by its open, high, low, and close (see OHLC). "Candle" refers to the common visual form of a bar.

Bid. The highest price a buyer is currently willing to pay. The counterpart to the ask.

Bracket / OCO. A pair of protective orders attached to a position — a stop-loss and a take-profit — where filling one cancels the other ("one cancels the other").

Crossover. The moment one line passes through another — for example a fast moving average crossing a slow one, or an oscillator crossing its zero or signal line. Often read as a momentum signal.

Cross / Isolated margin. Two ways an exchange backs a leveraged position. Cross margin shares your whole balance as collateral across positions; isolated margin ring- fences a set amount to one position, capping what a single trade can lose.

Divergence. When price and an indicator disagree — price making a higher high while the indicator makes a lower high, or vice versa — often read as weakening momentum.

Earcon. A short, distinct sound used as an event signal — a modal opening, an alert firing, a boundary reached — as opposed to the continuous sonification of values.

Fibonacci retracement / extension. Horizontal levels placed at standard ratios (23.6%, 38.2%, 50%, 61.8%, 78.6%) of a price move, used to anticipate where a pullback might pause (retracement) or where a continuation might reach (extension).

Fill. An execution of an order, in whole or in part. A "partial fill" completes only some of the requested quantity.

Heatmap. An overlay that shades each bar by relative volume so you can see — and, in playback, hear — where trading was most active.

Heikin-Ashi. A smoothed candlestick formula that averages price to reduce noise and make trends easier to follow.

Hybrid Voice. This terminal's core model: your screen reader speaks exact values while the built-in engine sonifies the shape of the market, the two heard together.

Leverage. Trading a position larger than your cash by borrowing from the exchange, expressed as a multiple (e.g. 10×). It magnifies both gains and losses and introduces a liquidation price.

Limit order. An order to buy or sell at a specified price or better, rather than at whatever the market currently offers (compare market order).

Liquidation. The exchange's forced closure of a leveraged position when losses threaten the borrowed funds — the price at which this happens is the liquidation price.

Log scale. A price axis where equal vertical distance means equal percentage move, useful over long histories where price has changed by large multiples.

Long / Short. A long position profits when price rises; a short position profits when price falls. In hedge mode an account can hold both sides at once — the position side.

Market order. An order to buy or sell immediately at the best available price (compare limit order).

Moving average. The average price over a number of recent bars, redrawn each bar — a smoothed line used to read trend direction and as a dynamic support/resistance level.

OHLC. The four prices that define a bar: Open (first trade), High, Low, and Close (last trade) of the period.

Oscillator. An indicator that moves around a centre line (such as RSI or MACD), measuring momentum or the speed of price change rather than price itself.

Overbought / Oversold. Zones at the extremes of an oscillator suggesting price may have risen (overbought) or fallen (oversold) faster than is sustainable. Not by themselves a signal to act.

Paper trading. A simulated mode that fills orders against the live price with imaginary money, so you can rehearse the whole workflow without risk.

Point of Control (POC). In a volume profile, the price level that saw the most trading volume.

Position. An open holding in a market — long or short — with a size, an entry price, and a running unrealized profit or loss until it is closed.

Post-only / Maker. An order that will only rest in the book (adding liquidity, paying the lower "maker" fee) and is cancelled rather than executed if it would fill immediately.

Realized / Unrealized P&L. Profit or loss that has been locked in by closing (realized) versus the running figure on a position still open (unrealized).

Reduce-only. An order flag that can only shrink or close an existing position, never open or enlarge one — a guard against accidentally flipping direction.

Sonification. Turning data into non-speech sound — here, mapping price and indicator values to pitch, timbre, and stereo position so you can hear the chart's shape.

Sound patch. A reusable, named voice built in the sound designer (Alt+W) — one or more layered oscillators plus noise and an envelope — that can be assigned to an event earcon or to an indicator component. Editing a patch updates everything using it.

Spread. The gap between the best bid and the best ask.

Stop-loss. A protective order that closes a position once price reaches a level working against you, capping the loss.

Stop / Stop-limit order. An order that activates only once price reaches a trigger price — then submitting as a market order (stop) or a limit order at a set price (stop-limit).

Support / Resistance. Price levels where falling tends to stall (support) or rising tends to stall (resistance), often where prior turning points or heavy volume sit.

Take-profit. An order that closes a position once price reaches a favourable target, locking in the gain. A "ladder" splits this across several targets.

Time-in-force (TIF). How long an order stays live: GTC (good-till-cancelled), IOC (immediate-or-cancel — fill what you can now, cancel the rest), or FOK (fill-or-kill — all at once or nothing).

Timeframe. The period each bar covers — one minute, one hour, one day, and so on.

Trailing stop. A stop-loss that follows price as it moves in your favour, locking in gains, and holds its level when price reverses — set by an amount, a percentage, or a callback rate.

Trigger price. The price at which a stop, stop-limit, or trailing order becomes active.

Value Area. In a volume profile, the band of price levels that together account for roughly 70% of traded volume.

VWAP. Volume-Weighted Average Price — the average price over a span weighted by volume at each level, used as a fair-value reference (see also Anchored VWAP).

Volume profile. A view of how much volume traded at each price level (rather than over time), highlighting the Point of Control and Value Area.