clawfort/openspec/changes/archive/2026-02-13-p16-more-bugs/proposal.md

Why

Recent UX and content-quality updates still leave several user-facing regressions unresolved across policy access, hero readability, share/back-to-top controls, translation quality, and image refetch behavior. These issues directly affect trust and usability, so we need a focused stabilization change that tightens both frontend interactions and backend content-quality guardrails.

What Changes

• Convert Terms of Use and Attribution access from full-page navigation to in-page modal dialogs while preserving clear disclosure content and keyboard accessibility.
• Remove hero-level permalink affordance from visible hero chrome.
• Improve hero readability for non-English content (Tamil/Malayalam) across desktop and mobile.
• Replace text-based copy/share and back-to-top controls with icon-based controls that remain accessible.
• Add translation quality validation to reduce wrong-language or gibberish outputs before serving/storing translated content.
• Upgrade admin refetch-images behavior so refreshed images are alternative (not same as current), subject-relevant, and filtered against unrelated animal/pet outcomes.
• Extend admin image refetch operations to accept a permalink target and fetch a new relevant image for that article.
• Keep deterministic AI-themed fallback behavior when confidence is low or relevance checks fail.

Capabilities

New Capabilities

• policy-disclosure-modals: In-page modal experience for Terms of Use and Attribution content (focus trap, escape close, deep-link-safe modal state).
• translation-quality-validation-gates: Post-translation validation gates (language/script sanity + gibberish rejection + deterministic fallback policy).
• permalink-targeted-image-refetch: Admin command support for refetching summary images by permalink target.
• alternative-image-selection-and-dedupe: Refetch pipeline guarantees alternative image selection, relevance scoring, repeat-image avoidance, and unsafe/unrelated-image filtering.

Modified Capabilities

• footer-policy-links: Footer policy access behavior changes from route navigation emphasis to modal activation flow.
• terms-of-use-risk-disclosure: Terms content remains required, but delivery surface changes from standalone page-centric flow to modal-capable flow.
• attribution-disclaimer-page: Attribution content remains required, but delivery surface changes from standalone page-centric flow to modal-capable flow.
• hero-display: Hero chrome removes visible permalink affordance and preserves clean primary/secondary actions.
• hero-summary-entry-and-readability: Strengthen multilingual hero readability requirements, especially for Tamil/Malayalam headline and summary rendering.
• responsive-device-agnostic-layout: Ensure icon-based controls and modal policy surfaces remain usable and unclipped on mobile/tablet/desktop.
• wcag-2-2-aa-accessibility: Icon-only controls and policy modals require explicit accessible labels, keyboard navigation, and focus behavior.
• article-translations-ml-tm: Add quality validation outcomes for generated Tamil/Malayalam translations before persistence/serving.
• language-aware-content-delivery: Define deterministic fallback behavior when requested translation fails quality validation.
• admin-maintenance-command-suite: Extend admin command contract to include permalink-targeted image refetch execution path.
• queued-image-refetch-with-backoff: Extend queue behavior to support targeted permalink jobs and non-repeat image outcomes.
• context-aware-image-selection-recovery: Improve subject extraction and keyword recovery for alternative relevant image retrieval.
• news-image-relevance-and-fallbacks: Tighten relevance/safety checks to reject unrelated animal/pet imagery and preserve AI-themed fallback when uncertain.

Impact

• Frontend/UI: frontend/index.html policy-link behavior, hero metadata/actions, icon controls, modal state handling, and locale-specific readability styles.
• Backend API/Routes: backend/main.py policy content delivery strategy and compatibility with modal-first access.
• Admin CLI: backend/cli.py image refetch command arguments and permalink-targeted workflow.
• Image pipeline: backend/news_service.py subject extraction, alternative image candidate selection, dedupe/repeat prevention, relevance/safety filtering, and fallback selection.
• Translation pipeline: backend/news_service.py translation response validation and fallback policy; potential metadata persistence updates in repository/model layers.
• Operational behavior: Additional logging/audit fields for translation-quality failures and image-refetch decision path to support debugging and trust.