Tactical Tech Lite is Live!
In July, we launched a new brand and website for Tactical Tech, acknowledging sixteen years of operation. Our projects are diverse, our output constant and our work is seen and used by people all over the world. Our new site uses modern web technologies to celebrate and showcase this work. But our audience includes individuals and organisations from communities where access to connections or newer devices are limited or restrictive. In some rare cases, modern web technologies even clash with security-specific setups, and in all of these cases, our work is difficult or impossible to access.
We're excited to launch another version of our website, one that directly addresses some of these challenges. Tactical Tech Lite is an ongoing, living experiment that aims to make our work accessible to all audiences. Upon visiting either Lite directly, or via the site menu, Lite uses a sparse design and relies heavily on the visitor's browser to style and display the site. This means that the average size of a page visit to Lite is just under 15kb, meaning that the site remains highly usable for visitors in challenging environments, unstable connections, and a wide range of devices – including screen readers. Essentially, Tactical Tech Lite is designed to be available to any computer that has a web browser –– even devices that don't support images or JavaScript.
The launch of Lite is a wonderful design-led collaboration between our Infrastructure, Engineering and Project teams. Tactical Tech's unique practical limitations (self hosted infrastructure only, no closed-sourced software, static websites where possible, etc) has pushed us to develop a new set of inter-locking tools and workflows that we use with our project teams to design, collaborate and launch new and existing projects.
Going forward, we can create and publish work at an even higher quality, and start to experiment with different online and offline formats. And with Lite we can use these workflows and tools to automatically make this work accessible to all, drawing on the decisions we make whilst creating work at the high standard we are known for. We have a long way to go with this project. There are many opportunities to optimise and tinker both with the design process and Lite's tooling itself. For now, we invite you to give it a try. We'd love to know what you think. https://lite.tacticaltech.org