What's new
Plain-language summary of the April 2026 polish release. This page is a shortened, user-facing version of the full changelog; the source-of-truth record lives in the repository at docs/polish/14-changelog.md.
Fixed
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Translator bug where certain word → language combinations produced no output.
The original report was English “fruit” → LSF, which emitted a SiGML string containing a literal
[object Object]and failed to render. The fix was twofold: the HamNoSys composer no longer produces that string, and similar database entries using the unsupported<hampalmud/>tag were either repaired or quarantined. - Contribute-page pipeline could get stuck on common English terms. Describing a sign like “dominant hand up and waving” used to bounce the waving token into an LLM fallback that sometimes failed. The vocabulary now maps waving / wave / waves to the HamNoSys pendulum-swing codepoint so the deterministic composer resolves them without calling out.
New
- Progress dashboard at /progress. Public, live view of language coverage, reviewer status, and cross-language gloss gaps. The “Help wanted” section shows real gaps; clicking one pre-fills the contribute form.
- Expanded credits page at /credits. Full per-corpus attribution: institution, license where declared, entry count, reviewer provenance, and upstream links. Corpora without a declared upstream license are marked plainly as “License unclear”.
- “Reviewed by Deaf native signer” badges on every translated word. The badge appears inline in translator output and on the contribute-page preview.
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Health, metrics, and snapshot endpoints.
/health,/metrics, and a scheduled snapshot pipeline now back the public dashboards. - Governance page at /governance. Standing reviewer list, evaluation criteria, and refusal mechanism.
Improved
- Contribute page design now matches the main site. The old brutalist shell was reconciled to the warm main-page design system. Every JS module ID is preserved.
- Translator smoothness, accessibility, and mobile experience. Loading bar appears only past a 200 ms threshold, reduced-motion preference is honoured, the visible focus ring is enforced, and every public route now passes axe-core with zero critical or serious violations — and scores 100 on Lighthouse accessibility.
- Unified navigation, footer, sitemap, and 404 across every public page.
Honest limitations we ship with
- The Deaf native-signer reviewer pool is still zero in the live snapshot. The dashboard reflects the truth: we have the infrastructure but not yet a reviewer. Community contributions are marked “Not yet reviewed” until that changes.
- Landing and translator pages score below the Lighthouse desktop performance target (77–78 vs 85). The bottleneck is the CWASA avatar bundle, a licensed third-party dependency we cannot modify. Lazy-loading CWASA on the landing page is a documented follow-up.
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The HamNoSys notation font (
bgHamNoSysUnicode.ttf) is referenced by the CSS but the binary is not yet committed. When the file is missing the browser falls back to the system monospace font; the page never errors. Getting the binary shipped through IDGS's distribution terms is on the post-launch punch list.