Customized PDFs of My Fanfic And Breaking The Chains of Centralization

[unspeakablehorror]

I recently updated my https://unspeakablehorror.net website with custom pdfs of all my fic! I'm looking forward to updating my epubs as well. Epub is imo the more important format of the two but I need to harness my attention for things when it's available, so things aren't necessarily going to happen in order of importance here. But I am very motivated to try to get the most out of the flexibility and freedom of running a small personal website. That's what keeps me going with this project.

I want to break away from the tyranny of platforms, not just the tyranny of particular individuals running those platforms (though breaking away from that tyranny is an added bonus). As much as the convenience of centralized platforms has done for opening up the use of the web, it has also closed off opportunities for expression. It's closed off choice of presentation. It's become a gatekeeper and delimiter for how we express ourselves and even what we express of ourselves.

I want to try to break away from that, as much as it is possible to do so.

Comments

[octahedrite]

Hi! I found you through my network page. Wanted to say that your site is really cool! I recognize Kev Quirk's css lol.

[unspeakablehorror]

Thanks! I really love getting into the details of archiving things, so that's kind of a big part of what gives me direction for my site. I want to explore the potential for archiving on a small-scale site. And being able to generate my own html, pdfs, and epubs is important to me for two reasons:

1. I want to be able to break away from the need to post on a centralized site like AO3 completely.

2. It's fun and I like the greater control over formatting options.

And yeah, Kev's simple.css file has been so helpful to me. Which also reminds me that I want to add a credit to him more prominently on that site and my other site https://new-old-web.neocities.org (though I do credit him in the Links section there). I want to talk more about my web design journey in general in fact.

Noticed you have a web archive too. Love the design of it! Sometime I might embellish my design a bit more, but graphic design isn't exactly my passion haha so I've been focusing on other things. But I do appreciate looking at nicely designed websites for sure.

[octahedrite]

Thanks, I'm glad to hear you think my site's pretty haha.

I can sympathize with wanting to break away; I think it's important to have a place of your own on the internet that's not subject to the whims of corporations (or just big and dysfunctional orgs, like Ao3). I have backups of all my work but I like having them archive-locked on Ao3, which is why I haven't put them on my own site yet. I can have them mirrored on my site in less than 5min in the event that Ao3 becomes unfeasible to use.

I wasn't sure if you'd appreciate unsolicited advice, but would you like to hear about some things related to accessibility that I noticed on your site?

[unspeakablehorror]

Sure, I greatly appreciate feedback! I try to figure out things myself because I don't want to impose on others, but if anyone has thoughts on their experience with the site, that helps me identify things to look more closely at.

[octahedrite]

1. The site is difficult to read on mobile. I think adding <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" /> to your head should help! You can read more about the viewport meta tag on MDN.

2. Idk how much you care about readability, but optimal line length is around ~65 characters per line. Using max-width: 65ch on article or section should help with that. (Putting it on body is a bad idea.) Btw, you can also apply this to pdfs!

3. For more accessibility stuff, I would recommend looking at the A11y checklist. Additionally, Pagespeed insights also checks some critera.

Also, I read about your struggle with creating accessible PDFs. I've heard that LaTeX is good for creating accessible PDFs, but it's a bit annoying to use on Windows plus it has a learning curve. (Am big LaTeX fan + use Linux.)

Sorry for the wall of text haha, hope some of this is helpful :)

[unspeakablehorror]

Thanks for your feedback! I'll definitely look into all this.

Also I should mention that I'm a big Linux user too! In fact the screenreader I've been using to test accessibility is orca, the standard Linux screenreader for this reason. I do have Windows so I plan to test accessibility on there too (with the free screenreader NVDA). But I only use Windows for things I can't do on Linux (or can't do easily--I don't really enjoy using WINE so I prefer to stick to Windows for Windows-specific apps even if they can be emulated).

I use mobile extensively, but thanks for reminding me of the text size issue. While it doesn't pose an issue for me personally, I can certainly understand the issues such small text could pose for a large number of mobile users.

I think it's actually the (also TeX derived) software ConTeXt that can generate accessible tagged PDFs--I just haven't figured out the actual tagging part yet. Though given the performance of all the other PDFs I've tried (including one I found online that *specifically* said it was accessible), the fault may not actually lie in the ConTeXt tagging itself. I think for the PDFs, I will continue to try to make them as accessible as I can reasonably make them, but I'm going to focus on accessibility for the HTML because the takeaway from my current research on this matter is that the most accessible PDF is an HTML page.