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Comment by doinathing | Hacker News Reader

This looks amazing! Please consider making your website more accessible... the menu cannot be focused with the tab key, the images in your gallery do not have alt attributes. Those are some low hanging fruit you can correct. The overall strategy of toggling the main content with CSS might need some aria announcing so folks at least know different stuff is on screen as you move from one thing to another.

Again, AMAZINGLY COOL project, not wanting to take anything away from that. Just want everybody to be able to learn about it, even if they are not mouse users, not sighted, etc.

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Not at all, this is exactly what I want, some good feedback, I hadn't even considered those things you mentioned, I'll look into it thanks!

In order to make it fully accessible you might want to start from scratch and make a more traditional site that's not doing so much with JS to manage what content is on screen. Which might be more than you have time to deal with. But generally, when showing/hiding/navigating with JS, you are short-circuiting a lot of stuff you get for free with the browser (focus reset, announcing of changes etc.) and you have to reimplement a bunch of stuff in JS to get the same effect.

Sometimes it's worth it if what you are doing with JS is highly interactive & there's a payoff. But in this case, each thing of content could be its own page, and that plus a little more semantic HTML would do wonders.

You're probably right, it's just that I'm more of a programmer than a web designer (this is my first site) so I just built everything with Clojure/Clojurescript. But I'll definitely do that once I have some time.

Is there any library you used on Clojure/Clojurescript? I had an abstract idea of building something similar to this.

Do I need any background in mechanics to build something like this?

I mentioned somewhere else here the libraries I used, search for jbullet with your browser and you'll find it. The rest I built myself. Clojurescript is just for the website. I don't have a background in mechanics, so no, not really. If anything I was trying to avoid the complications that real mechanical engineers have to deal with.

Sorry for the self promote, but this may be interesting for your usecase:

https://git.sr.ht/~evan-hoose/SSSSS

Feed it a directory structure with a couple of template files/markdown and it will spit out a website. It should be pretty simple to hack on. I've got a demo site [0], the source code for which is [1].

Feel free to shoot me an email if you've got questions, or if you want to tell me this is stupid, or if this looks like spam, or for whatever.

[0] a-shared-404.com

[1] https://git.sr.ht/~evan-hoose/a-shared-404

I'm available if you want to chat or work through anything in this space. Would be great if you can find a way to create your site that works for you and makes it accessible for everyone.

Thanks, I'll remember that offer when I'm doing that.

That's really cool feedback - and now I'm wondering if more projects shouldn't put their websites on GitHub (or similar) so people who want to contribute but who's skills are web/frontend focussed have an easy way to make updates and send pull requests?

I actually have started do this when I see an OSS project site that just needs some quick tweaks. It's easy to open the web editor and add missing labels or attributes or something.

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