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.
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.
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.
For me I think CSS is hard to understand mostly because the underlying concepts are low level and designed to accommodate ALL POSSIBLE rendering scenarios, not just "I'm putting a website on this laptop or phone screen".
CSS is able to target print and all manner of other different scenarios and needs. It's inherently complicated because it's very flexible and accounts for all kinds of use cases.
The problem is you don't need all that power most of the time, but it's there. To understand CSS you have to understand a lot of underlying concepts about layout and web page structure. People feel like "Why do I have to remember all these arbitrary rules?!". I sympathize - and sure a fair few things are arbitrary and never changed due to not breaking existing code - but most of the rules are not arbitrary, they just serve a bigger world than what we might be dealing with as web devs.
In the end I prefer to think of CSS as a powerful programming language that gives me lots of _primitives_, not a framework with a bunch of out of the box behavior that matches my narrow needs. If you want those, they are out there of course.
But yeah. CSS is hard and it takes study, practice, and time to be good at it. I think half of the time we struggle with CSS it's because we expect that it is "easy" and that it should cooperate without us investing time in learning it. It's written in short lines that look like plain English. It should do what we expect all the time, right?
My mother did a maths degree in her 50s, remotely, over several years. She grew up in a time and place where she didn't have the opportunity to get that eduction. She just wanted it for the sake of it, I suppose to prove to herself that she could. But mainly to "get the qualification", not do anything with it. It was a perfectly fine reason to do a degree. Plus I think the person you're responding to was being at least a little tongue-in-cheek anyway so no big deal either way.
Seeing the donations coming in (and making one myself) I was reminded that this sculpture is the reason I know about the event in the first place and, saw the significance of the help, and felt moved to donate. It made me think a lot about how public art and the things we commemorate with public art can have a tangible impact on our actions and our beliefs.
> If you believe there's risk in passing someone, I think you also have to believe that there's risk in standing 6 feet behind them for a needlessly prolonged period of waiting.'
There is risk in both things. There's risk being in the same room, typing on the same keypad for payment, risk in being near people outdoors.
So we take calculated measures to reduce the risk. The advice is maintain six feet, but that's not some magic number between risk and no risk.
I don't feel assaulted if somebody passes by me either, but I'm not aiming to voluntarily increase my risk by intentionally causing myself to come close to other people if I can just hang back or go another way. I don't care what the majority of the behavior is, we all have to do what seems reasonable to us.
I'm lucky enough that I can almost completely avoid being in the store at all, or anywhere else that has groups of people, which I do since that's the lower risk approach.
My partner has a respiratory condition, we have elderly relatives that we bring food to, we have to try any practical steps we can do not pass on the disease to other people in our lives, who might have a very bad time or die if they get it.
They don't have to be followed in every possible instance, but they provide good guidance about what is expected when you see another person, and helps massively reduce the amount of situations where people pass each other going opposite directions. There's obviously no need to respect the arrows if you are grabbing something and going the "wrong way" doesn't put you in close contact with somebody else. By all means jump around lanes.
And yes, wait for the person to move on, don't squeeze past them, that's the whole point.
I have no data but it seems like something that would be helpful.
If this works effectively I think it's a valuable choice to offer to autistic people - whether they choose to use it or not is totally valid of course. Often what people with disabilities are forced to do is choose an imperfect "accommodation", or choose to not participate in something at all, since it is not an option to instantly convert our society to a more compassionate, understanding, and fair place.
I agree with you that the real thing here is that we should accept all people regardless of how they view/prioritize our emotions and meet each other where we all are. But until we are all in that same agreement, I'm all for tools that provide increased agency/information to people who want to use those tools.
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.