Whakerexa — A minimalist and lightweight web kit for accessible contents

Overview

Whakerexa is a lightweight front-end toolkit that blends clarity, accessibility, and flexibility, and long-term maintainability. It provides a modern CSS foundation and a fully modular ES6 JavaScript components to build interfaces that are both elegant and inclusive — with minimal code and maximum readability, without dependencies.

Designed around accessibility from the start, Whakerexa makes it easy to craft clean, human-friendly HTML that just works — without drowning your pages in class names or dependencies. Every visual aspect — colors, typography, spacing, animations — is defined through CSS variables, giving you full creative control with a few redefinitions.

Version 2.0 introduces a unified public API through wexa.js and a stable global namespace through wexa.bundle.js, ensuring support for both modern ES6 module-based applications and offline/static environments.

It pairs naturally with WhakerPy, the lightweight Python library for generating dynamic HTML, offering a seamless workflow from code to design.

Features

• ✨ Lightweight, semantic, dependency-free, and modular
• 🌓 Built-in light / dark themes
• 🔆 High-contrast accessibility mode
• 🎨 Fully customizable through CSS variables
• 🧩 Composable and extensible — adapt to your needs
• ⚙️ Object-oriented ES6 components
• ⚙️ Unified API (import … from "wexa.js" or Wexa.*)
• ⚙️ Single-file bundle for no-module environments
• ⚙️ Zero dependencies, 100 % open source

Install Whakerexa

Whakerexa is distributed as a ZIP archive.
Simply unpack it.

Quick Start

For usage examples of the CSS and JS frameworks, visit the online documentation:

👉 https://whakerexa.sourceforge.io

The HTML files available in the docs folder are also provided for offline reference, but note that dynamic examples (those using JavaScript modules) require a web server and will not work if opened directly from your disk (file:// protocol).

Browse the local documentation with:

> python -m http.server 8000 

Then open a new tab into Firefox with the url: http://localhost:8000/docs/

Projects using Whakerexa

Whakerexa was initially developed within SPPAS https://sppas.org. It was extracted from its original software in 2024 by the author to lead its own life as standalone tool.

Websites

It is used by the website of the "AutoCuedSpeech" project at https://auto-cuedspeech.org and the website of SPPAS https://sppas.org.

Author/Copyright

Copyright (C) 2023-2025 - Brigitte Bigi, CNRS - contact@sppas.org Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France.

See the AUTHORS file for the full list of contributors.

License

Whakerexa is under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.

Support

Whakerexa was initially developed within https://auto-cuedspeech.org project, generously funded by FIRAH (Fondation Internationale de Recherche Appliquée sur le Handicap), https://www.firah.org/. It is also developed with the support of Laboratoire Parole et Langage https://www.lpl-aix.fr.

Changes

Version 0.1

• Initial version, extracted from SPPAS 4.17.
• Added or updated, and tested JavaScripts
• Updated CSS frameworks to be more generic
• Added HTML documentation of the CSS frameworks
• Added a CSS/JS framework for playing a video in a popup dialog

Version 0.2

• Added code.css, a set of colors for highlighting source code.
• Added menu.css, a solution for an accessible responsive sticky menubar
• Added layout.css, a set of classes to easily organize HTML content
• Added accordion.js which must be added when using "rise-panel"

Version 0.3

• Changed some colors of code.css
• Added variable 'border-radius' in wexa.css
• Modified details/summary to act and look like buttons
• The "rise-panel/accordion" is deprecated (HTML-3), use HTML-5 details/summary instead
• Added modal dialogs to show an alert message: info, success, warning, error, tips, question

Version 0.4

This is mainly a bug-correction version: adjusted some width, removed transparency of background dialogs, corrected a bug in accessibility.

Version 0.5

• Added accessibility icons
• Added upload of files in request.js
• Minor CSS changes
• Migrated license, from GPL to AGPL.

Version 0.6

• Added sortatable: a CSS/JS utility designed for sorting table rows in ascending or descending order
• Added toggleselect: CSS/JS utility for toggling checkbox states.
• Added custom buttons: introduced CSS classes text-reveal-button, action-button, apply-button and switch.
• Updated request.js: better support of upload, better error management in post.

Version 0.7

• Re-organized documentation
• Updated the switch button
• Debug of action-button
• Minor changes in wexa.css

Version 0.8

• This is mainly some debug.

Version 1.0

Version 1.0 establishes Whakerexa as a modular, object-oriented web kit centered on a unified entry point.

• Core entry point: wexa.js, which instantiates:

  1. OnLoadManager — Delayed, ordered component initialization.
  2. WexaLogger — Unified logging.
  3. AccessibilityManager — Themes and contrast.
  4. MenuManager — Navigation menus and submenus.
  5. DialogManager — Opening/closing dialogs and popup videos.

• Menus are fully re-implemented (CSS + JS). See docs/menu.html.

• Dialogs are managed by DialogManager (legacy functions replaced).
• Backward compatibility with pre-1.0 procedural APIs is limited and not fully ensured.
• Not all minor/specialized classes have been ported (e.g., Book, ToggleSelector, SortaTable).

This version also includes a set of monochrome SVG icons.

Version 2.0 — stable

Version 2.0 is a complete modernization. Previous procedural APIs are not preserved.

• Unified ES6 entry point (wexa.js) exporting all components.
• wexa.bundle.js exposes the global namespace window.Wexa for file:// usage.
• The progress() function is removed. Use the ProgressBar class instead (see docs/progressbar.html).
• Use Wexa.onload instead of OnLoadManager, Wexa.dialog instead of DialogManager, etc.
• WexaLogger is extended: numeric levels from 0 (most verbose) to 50 (critical only). Messages are shown when their level is >= the current logLevel.
• Improved request.js: JSON detection through Content-Type with silent fallback for non-JSON responses.
• Updated documentation and offline demos. Fixed license documentation to GFDL 1.3, except for slides. See: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.en.html for details.
• Added an "extra" JS package for slides. Currently proposed as a PoC.