This week we made the building easy to walk. We published a full Site Directory — every section, every page, nothing hidden behind a menu you have to guess at. We broke the House Style Guide out of its accordions so every guide has an address you can link and cite. We gave readers a single reading-preferences panel and eight fonts, so you choose how the words meet your eyes. We traded legal jargon for a Terms of Use that welcomes reuse instead of forbidding it. And we gave the Reframer’s Journey a front door. Default to open, all the way down to linkable.
Throughline
- Default to open means default to linkable. The Site Directory lays out the whole building as plain accessible lists, and the Style Guide steps out of its accordions into a hub of citable subpages. A guide nobody can link to is a guide that can’t be cited or shared. Nothing hides behind a click anymore — and the same openness makes us findable by machines, too.
- You choose how the words meet your eyes. One “Aa Reading” panel now gathers theme, font, and text size in one place, with eight reading fonts — including our first serif — each deferring to your own browser and OS settings. Access isn’t one right setting; it’s the room to pick your own.
- A welcome, not a warning. Our new Terms of Use affirmatively welcomes citing, quoting, embedding, translating, and remixing our work, and the Reframer’s Journey finally has a hub to gather its seven stops. Front doors that welcome, not gates that warn.
The Work
The Whole Building
The Orientation Map was only ever a “find the right door” page — a handful of starting points by need. It was never meant to be the whole building. The Site Directory is. It lays out all fourteen sections and every one of our hundreds of pages, nested the way the site is actually structured, as plain accessible lists — screen-reader friendly, no reliance on spatial layout — with a clickable visual tree of the main sections at the top. The four largest collections (the Field Guide, Philosophy, the Pattern Language, and the Library) are shown as hubs that link onward rather than dumped inline, because a flat list of everything is more overwhelm, not less. Nothing is hidden behind a menu you have to guess at. It’s cross-linked from the Orientation Map, the nav menus, and the footer.
Default to Open, Default to Linkable
The House Style Guide had grown into one long page of stacked accordions, and the accordions were quietly breaking things — they scrambled the table of contents and made it impossible to link to any single guide. A guide nobody can link to is a guide that can’t be cited, shared, or crosswalked. So we took it apart and rebuilt it as a hub with subpages. The flagship guide — voice, tone, identity-first language, typography, accessibility, forms, and why we write Autistic — stays at the top URL where it belongs, now with a table of contents that actually works. Six companion guides step out on their own, each with a real, citable address: Writing Style, the Contributor Checklist, Scrollytelling, Neurodiversity-Friendly Content, Punctuation & Mechanics, and Why Sheets. Default to open means default to linkable.
Choose How You Read
Last week you got to choose your own light; this week you choose your own letters. We built a reading-font control mirroring the dark-mode architecture — data-font on the page, your preference kept in the browser, a flash-free load, and fonts fetched only when you pick them — then consolidated it with theme and text-size into one labelled “Aa Reading” trigger that opens a reading-preferences popover. The same controls, now grouped under one discoverable entry point instead of crowding the header, painted with the site palette so they flip light and dark along with everything else. There are eight fonts now — Montserrat (the house default), Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, Lexend, OpenDyslexic, Playpen Sans, Roboto, Noto Sans, and Literata, our first serif — each deferring to your own browser and OS settings rather than overriding them. We renamed the technical reference from “Light/Dark Mode” to Reading Experience: Design & Technical Notes to match its now-broader scope, gave it a reader-agency goal up top and a complete “where everything lives” index at the bottom, and updated every inbound cross-link to match. The environment bends to the person, not the person to the environment.
Findable by Machines, Too
We continued the AI-discoverability work with a new FAQ page — 18 answer-first questions covering what Stimpunks is, how to request aid or a creator grant, our licensing and reuse, volunteering, and our most-asked glossary terms (neurodivergent, monotropism, AuDHD, spiky profile, and more), each linking back to its fuller page so the FAQ doubles as a topic-cluster hub. It emits valid FAQPage schema — still parsed by AI crawlers even after Google retired FAQ rich results in May. In the same pass we fixed the site’s heading hierarchy to a single H1 per template, expanded the Organization schema (sameAs, taxID, nonprofitStatus, award, a postal address, and publisher-transparency properties drawn from our Site policies), wired authors into the org entity with worksFor/knowsAbout/jobTitle, and produced a 1200×675 social image. Being legible to people and being legible to machines turn out to be the same discipline: say the plain thing, link it, and don’t hide it.
A Welcome, Not a Warning
We published a new Terms of Use, “A Welcome, Not a Warning” — plain-language and deliberately permissive, in line with our license and privacy pages and our free-cultural-works stance. Instead of the usual lockdown-and-jargon terms, it affirmatively welcomes citing, quoting, embedding, translating, and remixing our work under CC BY-SA 4.0, while still covering the essentials in human language: what’s ours versus openly licensed, a golden-rule acceptable-use section, an “as is” / not-professional-advice disclaimer with crisis guidance, and a note that our mutual aid and creator grants keep their own terms. It’s linked from the footer beside Privacy and License — and, quietly, it closes the “legal and compliance pages” gap in the AI-discoverability checklist. A terms page can be a threshold you’re welcomed across instead of a gate that warns you off.
The Journey Gets a Front Door
The scrollytelling passage that opens our website has always been a journey, but this week we rewrote its opening from the ground up — new intros for all seven stops, from bringing our stims to the front and taking a walk in our shoes, through our story, taking neurodiversity and disability justice together, and our umbrella, to the reframe the whole journey is named for and the happy flappy stim-dance that ends it in motion. The journey never had a hub to gather it, so we built one: The Reframer’s Journey: Surviving, Reframing, and Finding Our People, now the narrative entry point in Our Series that the analytical series build on. In the same pass we retired the old encyclopedia framing from our storytelling-craft document and refocused it entirely on method: How We Tell Our Stories now sits under the Field Guide as the long, worked companion to the House Style Guide — the guide keeps the voice from drift, the companion shows the form that voice takes when a page becomes a story — with a 301 from the old address so nothing breaks.
Week 31 Changelog
- Published “Stimpunks.org Changelog for Week 30 2026: From the Weather to the Compass, From the Light to the Dark.”
- Site Directory. A new page laying out all fourteen sections and every one of our hundreds of pages, nested the way the site is actually structured, as plain accessible lists — screen-reader friendly, no reliance on spatial layout — with a clickable visual tree of the main sections at the top. The four largest collections (the Field Guide, Philosophy, the Pattern Language, and the Library) are shown as hubs that link onward rather than dumped inline, because a flat list of everything is more overwhelm, not less. Cross-linked from the Orientation Map, the nav menus, and the footer. Where the map points you at the right door, the directory shows you the whole building.
- Broke the House Style Guide out of its accordion and into a hub with six companion guides. The guide had grown into one long page of stacked accordions that scrambled the table of contents and made it impossible to link to any single guide. We rebuilt it as a hub with subpages: the flagship guide — voice, tone, identity-first language, typography, accessibility, forms, and why we write Autistic — stays at the top URL with a table of contents that actually works, and six companion guides step out with real, citable addresses: Writing Style, the Contributor Checklist, Scrollytelling, Neurodiversity-Friendly Content, Punctuation & Mechanics, and Why Sheets. Default to open means default to linkable.
- Published “Why We Don’t Use Accessibility Overlays” under the IT Accessibility hub — four sections (short answer, what an overlay is, why we don’t use them, what we do instead), with the Overlay Fact Sheet as the primary source and Equalize Digital as further reading.
- A reading-font control and text-size control in the header. Built a reading-font switcher mirroring the dark-mode architecture —
data-fonton the page, preference kept in the browser, a flash-free head script, a KSES-safe segmented control, and lazy font loading, all re-pointing the type variable per font with no!importantso a reader’s browser or OS override still wins. Documented in a new “Reading-font switcher” reference (fonts and rationale, the variable-repoint mechanism, lazy loading, gotchas, and where each piece lives). - Reading experience — a preferences panel, more fonts, refreshed docs. Consolidated the header’s theme, reading-font, and text-size controls behind a single labelled “Aa Reading” trigger that opens a reading-preferences popover — the same controls, now grouped under one discoverable entry point using the native Popover API (with a fallback), painted with the site palette so it flips light and dark with everything else. Added three fonts — Roboto, Noto Sans, and Literata (our first serif) — bringing the total to eight, each deferring to the reader’s own browser and OS settings rather than overriding them. Renamed the technical reference to Reading Experience: Design & Technical Notes to match its broader scope, documented the text-size control and the preferences panel, gave §1 a reader-agency goal and §11 a complete “where everything lives” index, and updated every inbound cross-link (color-palette and overlays pages) to the new title and URL.
- AI discoverability — a FAQ page and structured data. Published a FAQ page built with the Yoast FAQ block — 18 answer-first questions covering what Stimpunks is, how to request aid or a creator grant, content reuse and licensing, volunteering, and our most-asked glossary terms (neurodivergent, monotropism, AuDHD, spiky profile, and more), each linking back to its fuller page so the FAQ doubles as a topic-cluster hub. It emits valid
FAQPageschema, still parsed by AI crawlers even after Google retired FAQ rich results in May 2026. Also fixed the site’s heading hierarchy to a single H1 per template, expanded the Organization schema (sameAs,taxID,nonprofitStatus,award, postaladdress, and publisher-transparency properties via Yoast Site policies), wired authors into the org entity withworksFor/knowsAbout/jobTitle, and produced a 1200×675 social site image. - Published a new Terms of Use page, “A Welcome, Not a Warning” — plain-language and deliberately permissive, in line with our license and privacy pages and our free-cultural-works stance. It affirmatively welcomes citing, quoting, embedding, translating, and remixing our work under CC BY-SA 4.0, while still covering the essentials in human language: what’s ours versus openly licensed, a golden-rule acceptable-use section, an “as is” / not-professional-advice disclaimer with crisis guidance, and a note that our mutual aid and creator grants keep their own terms. Linked from the footer alongside Privacy and License — which also closes the “legal and compliance pages” gap in the AI-discoverability checklist.
- Gave the Reframer’s Journey a front door — and a fresh voice at every stop. Rewrote the opening scrollytelling passage from the ground up: new intros for all seven stops, from bringing our stims to the front and taking a walk in our shoes, through our story, taking neurodiversity and disability justice together, and our umbrella, to the reframe and the happy flappy stim-dance that ends it in motion. Published The Reframer’s Journey: Surviving, Reframing, and Finding Our People as a series overview and added it to Our Series as the narrative entry point the analytical series build on. In the same pass, retired the old encyclopedia framing from our storytelling-craft document and refocused it on method — How We Tell Our Stories now sits under the Field Guide as the long, worked companion to the House Style Guide, with a 301 from the old address so nothing breaks.
- Refreshed the Now page so it tells the truth about right now. Drafted Objectives and Key Results for Q3 2026 — five objectives drawn not from what we planned in April but from what Weeks 27–30 actually did: maturing the AI ethics and alignments architecture and its crosswalk program, opening the two new front doors at ★ stuff and Cavendish Cards, showing the whole organization in public through the Strategic Environment analysis and the Framing Documents index, holding the weekly-and-monthly public cadence, and building slow-and-steady toward sustainability. Rewrote the Ongoing list to match — retiring finished work and naming the crosswalks, the microsites, the accountability publishing, and our fiscal sponsorship of the Lilypad Library as the threads that don’t have a finish line. A Now page is only worth keeping if it stays honest.
- Drafted cold-open section introductions for two overlapping Learning Space pages — 🌎 Online: Bringing Safety to the Serendipity and Our Technology: Open Source Communication and Indie Ed-Tech — giving a prose lede to sections that previously cold-opened with a block quote. On Our Technology we also expanded the Communication Stack into a single tied-together model — the stack as a “toolbelt for talking” — and deliberately angled the page toward open source communication, indie ed-tech, constructionism, blogging, and toolbelt theory to distinguish it from the overlapping Online page.
- Added “Busting myths about autism” to Navigating Autism Acceptance Month and Autism Myths.
Week 31. We drew the whole building, not just the door, and gave every guide an address you can link to. We put theme, font, and text size behind one panel and eight fonts, so you choose how the words meet your eyes. We wrote a terms page that welcomes you across the threshold instead of warning you off it, gave the Reframer’s Journey a hub to gather its seven stops, and made the Now page tell the truth about now. Broken systems, not broken people. Default to open; default to linkable; choose how you read; you’re welcome here.