How I run my own site

01 — Who Owns the Standard

Institutional channels decay in a predictable way. Comms writes the copy. Someone else builds the container. Nobody owns the standard in between. A fact changes on one page and stays wrong on four others. An agency ships something that looks right and fails a screen reader. Six months later nobody remembers who was supposed to check.

I ran this site the way I'd run an institution's own channel. One owner. One standard. Nothing ships until it's been read back on a phone and a desktop, checked for accessibility, and confirmed against the source.

02 — Accessibility as Brand Integrity

The floor is WCAG 2.2 Level AA, the international standard. A checklist tests contrast on white paper. Real readers bring glare, tremors on glass, a screen reader, a locked-down work laptop. These are the decisions that came from those readers, not from the checklist. The standard itself lives in public on the Accessibility page, not in an agency handoff document.

• Every press is confirmed. On a touchscreen your finger covers the button, and with a tremor a quick tap can feel like it never landed. Every button and link confirms the press, and documents announce themselves: "Opening résumé in a new tab."
• Nobody gets stranded. Jump links move you, not just the page, so keyboard and switch users land inside the section they asked for. Email has a backup: reviewers on university or hospital laptops often have no mail app set up, so a "Copy email address" button sits beside it and says out loud when it's done.
• Room for unsteady hands. Small links carry a generous tap area, the size the standard asks for. The type looks the same.
• Readers always know where they are. Links that leave the site say so, with an arrow and a spoken note naming the destination. High-contrast mode uses near-black on near-white, because pure black on pure white glares for photophobic and dyslexic readers. Blank spacer lines are gone, because a screen reader announces them as "blank."

03 — One Place for the Facts

In large organizations, information falls out of sync in a predictable way. The bio says one thing, the archive says another, the feed says a third. Here every fact lives in one place. Publish a field note like Cold Chicken once, and it appears correctly everywhere it belongs: the homepage, the archive, the feed, and its own share card. Change a number once and every page that quotes it changes with it.

That's the conversation I'd want to have with any web team or agency: not "make it look good," but "show me how a correction reaches every page."