About this site

How it is made

Legible Traces is written by hand in plain HTML and CSS with one small script — no framework, no trackers, nothing to install. The type is EB Garamond and Fraunces, both under the SIL Open Font License and served from this site. Every banner and kaleidoscope begins as a public-domain or openly licensed work, credited in the Free-Use Artwork Gallery. Search runs in your browser on an index built with Pagefind. The site is hosted on Cloudflare.

What the site keeps

No cookies are set by the site, and there are no ads, accounts or forms. Three optional settings are saved in your own browser and never sent anywhere:

lt_motion

whether you turned motion off

lt_lang

the language you chose for the welcome notice

lt_read

your reading settings (text size, spacing, page tone)

Each is removed when you set it back to its default, or when you clear this site's data in your browser. Cloudflare, which hosts the site, processes each request — including your IP address — to deliver and protect it (its bot protection can set a short-lived security cookie), and counts page views with its cookie-free Web Analytics. The home page loads a publication list from PhilPeople. Partner videos and audio on the Pathways pages come from YouTube (in its privacy-enhanced mode) and SoundCloud, and load only when you press play. Links that leave this site follow the policies of the sites they lead to.

Accessibility

The site aims to meet WCAG 2.2 at level AA. Motion follows your system's reduced-motion setting, and the Motion button in the corner turns the ripples, drifting banners and page transitions off on any device. The Aa button on every reading page changes text size, line spacing and page tone, from night to sepia to paper. Notes open beside the text, every control works from the keyboard, and each reading page carries the full text in HTML, which is the accessible version of its PDF.

Known gaps: some older PDFs are not fully tagged for screen readers, the kaleidoscope backgrounds are decorative only, and partner players are hosted by YouTube and SoundCloud. If anything here gets in your way, write to author@legibletraces.com.

Citing the work

Each reading page has a How to cite this work box with Chicago, APA, MLA and BibTeX versions built from its deposit record, and Google Scholar and Zotero read the citation details directly from the page. The DOI is always the canonical citation. To cite the site as a whole:

Johnson, Jamison Todd. Legible Traces. Kansas City, MO: Legible Traces LLC, 2026. https://legibletraces.com.

Following along

New work and revisions are announced on the home page and in an Atom feed that any feed reader can follow. The Paths & Constellation page shows how every piece connects.

Licence

The writing is shared under CC BY 4.0: reuse it freely, with attribution. The artwork keeps its own public-domain or open status, as listed in the gallery.