Mandaris

Tuesday, I released a post with and version bump of Labarum. I then went on and recorded a podcast stating that theme was now “feature complete”.

Well, I was wrong.

I went to the Homebrew Website Club to do some socializing and shared my site with the others. I pride myself on having a site that is pretty accessible. Turns out that the color contrast on my links isn’t good enough. I knew I had tested the basic font, but had misattributed the links not passing the contrast test as an issue with the test itself.

Definitely, I needed an intervention.

So, I spent about an hour going through all the accessibility issues and HTML validation errors. Some of them I can’t change at this time because the code is generated by Hugo/Goldmark. For example, if you have multiple articles on a page (index or list) and they each have a set of footnotes or use a table of contents, you will get an error about them using the same ids for those items.

I’m not going to put the time or energy into that.

Other issues such as a warning about using a trailing slash in the HTML did make me pause for a moment. For example the following from site-head.html:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />

And

<img 
  src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/661/2023/children-who-are-wrong.jpg" 
  alt="Principal Skinner thinks the children  are wrong"
  title="Self Reflection can be hard."/>

I decided to keep examples like these and ignore the issue for now.

Other accessible issues that I’m not going to put more energy into at this point are the code blocks. Some of the contrast colors for keywords were flagged, and the tabindex="0" can make keyboard navigation more difficult than it needs to be.

The most egregious issue is that I use the colors in the headers and links at the very top of the page. I’ve since changed it in both light and dark mode to be something closer to the basic font color but still within the Nord color scheme.

Since I’m changing the colors, I’ll have to redo the images that I have in the README.md which will probably make me think of other things to change. I’m both dreading and excited by doing that as I’ve learned more about what makes for a good demonstration of Labarum.

What is the next opportunity for Labarum?

My favorite part about this post and this point release is that I’m writing about what I’m not going to do.

Sure, there are places that the theme needs improvement¹, but I have never been more confident and happy with where it is. I looked at the git history and the first commit was February 21st, 2022. That’s a significant amount of time.

I want to spend more time putting stuff on the blog and less time on what it looks like.

There are going to be changes in the future.

But at this point, it will be focused on changes that are related to the content that I’m creating.