[EI-6.6 — Accessibility & Experience Quality Gates]

EI-6.6 — Accessibility & Experience Quality Gates

Status: COMPLETE
Date: 2026-08-08

Objective

Extend the repository-level quality gate so the presentation and accessibility decisions made during EI-6 cannot silently regress while preserving the editorial governance already established in EI-3 through EI-5.

Automated invariants added

The gate now verifies objective, repository-testable conditions only.

<html lang="en-US"> remains present.
Primary navigation retains an accessible label.
Active primary navigation retains aria-current="page" behavior.
A skip link targeting #main remains present.
The main content wrapper remains a semantic <main id="main"> landmark.

Viewport and motion

The viewport remains zoom-friendly.
maximum-scale and user-scalable=no are rejected.
A prefers-reduced-motion: reduce rule remains present.

Keyboard operation

Shared :focus-visible styling remains present.
Skip-link styling remains present.

Media governance

The About page must use the governed production asset images/avatar.jpg.
References to the EI-2-removed images/frodriguez.jpg or images/frodriguez-archived.jpg fail the gate.

Discovery rendering regression

EI-6.4 exposed a Jekyll/Liquid failure where Markdown generated inside Liquid loops could be emitted literally to the browser. The gate now checks the major generated discovery surfaces and rejects the known Liquid-generated Markdown-list pattern.

Surfaces covered:

/categories/
/writing/
/featured/
/history/
/loudmouth/
/ptir/

These pages should use explicit semantic HTML for generated lists.

Existing editorial checks retained

The expanded gate continues to enforce:

canonical content_type and subject vocabulary;
revised historical provenance rules;
Featured importance values;
stable explicit permalink format and uniqueness;
PTIR publication/content-type rules;
protected /blog/ and /links/ compatibility routes;
retirement of Blog pagination;
prohibition on the invalid slugize filter;
prohibition on legacy category-generated related-reading logic.

Workflow change

The GitHub Actions workflow is now named Editorial and experience quality gates and runs the combined repository check on pushes to main and pull requests.

Deliberate exclusions

EI-6.6 does not attempt to automate subjective judgments such as:

whether individual alt text is sufficiently descriptive;
whether a color scheme is aesthetically successful;
whether typography feels appropriately balanced;
whether a historical artifact deserves production promotion;
whether a mobile navigation layout is visually ideal.

Those require human review. The automated gate is intentionally limited to stable technical invariants and known regression classes.

Result

EI-6.6 is complete. Accessibility and experience decisions now have repository-level regression protection alongside the existing editorial governance.

Next sprint: EI-6.7 — Validation & Closeout.