[EI-6 — Site Experience & Accessibility]

EI-6 — Site Experience & Accessibility

Status: COMPLETE Started: 2026-08-08 Completed: 2026-08-08

Objective

Make the curated paco.org corpus easier to read, navigate, discover, and use across devices without undoing the editorial and historical decisions completed in EI-1 through EI-5.

The governing principle remains:

Preserve what is worth remembering. Curate everything else.

EI-6 is a presentation and usability series, not a new content-migration pass. Historical provenance, privacy exclusions, canonical subjects, Featured calibration, and protected routes remain authoritative.

Work packages

EI-6.1 — Experience baseline and accessibility audit — COMPLETE

Audited the shared templates, navigation, typography, responsive behavior, semantic HTML, keyboard operation, focus visibility, motion, image handling, link clarity, and landing-page hierarchy. Findings became the implementation backlog for EI-6.2 through EI-6.6.

EI-6.2 — Global hierarchy and typography — COMPLETE

Improved long-form readability while preserving the established identity:

homepage headline: Still learning.
header tagline: Learn. Teach. Tech.
system UI body typography for authored content
terminal/interface typography retained for site chrome
constrained long-form measure and improved heading behavior

EI-6.3 — Responsive and keyboard accessibility — COMPLETE

Added a skip link, semantic main landmark, zoom-friendly viewport, visible keyboard focus, reduced-motion handling, and improved optional-terminal assistive behavior while keeping core navigation JavaScript-independent.

Reduced the primary masthead to About, Teaching, Writing, PTIR, and CV while retaining secondary destinations contextually and in the footer. Repaired the Liquid-generated-Markdown rendering failure across Subjects, Writing, Featured, History, The Loudmouth, and PTIR by generating semantic HTML directly.

EI-6.5 — Media, evidence, and portfolio presentation — COMPLETE

Kept production media governed by EI-2, retained the controlled Loudmouth gallery model, corrected the About portrait to the governed avatar, preserved the evidence-driven Journalism & Media Portfolio, and avoided speculative/private media restoration. The decorative connection status presentation was refined into a Hayes Smartmodem-inspired CSS panel with reduced-motion behavior.

EI-6.6 — Accessibility and experience quality gates — COMPLETE

Expanded the repository quality gate to protect objective editorial and experience invariants, including language, viewport, skip link, main landmark, focus, reduced motion, navigation state, governed About media, generated discovery rendering, and accessible footer icon links.

EI-6.7 — Validation and closeout — COMPLETE

Reconciled the final implementation against the editorial model, privacy exclusions, historical provenance, navigation/taxonomy, responsive and keyboard behavior, long-form readability, media governance, and GitHub Pages build. Final validation also corrected unlabeled icon-only footer links before closeout.

See docs/EI-6.7-VALIDATION-CLOSEOUT.md for the final validation record.

Constraints preserved

DELETE-classified historical content was not republished or restored.
Media associated with privacy-excluded historical material was not restored to production.
Blog was not reintroduced as the site’s organizing model.
Taxonomy was not expanded to solve presentation problems.
Historical dates and provenance were preserved.
Semantic HTML and progressive enhancement remain preferred over JavaScript-dependent presentation.
Accessibility changes target actual usability rather than automated scores alone.
Stable URLs and protected compatibility routes remain intact.

Result

EI-6 is complete. paco.org now combines the curated editorial architecture established in EI-1 through EI-5 with a clearer reading hierarchy, simpler navigation, repaired discovery surfaces, stronger keyboard and motion accessibility, governed media presentation, and repository-level regression protection.