How to Read This Text
This site is powered by Commentpress, which allows comments to be attached to individual paragraphs, to whole pages, or to an entire document. To leave a comment on a paragraph, click the ‘speech bubble’ icon to its left; the appropriate comments section will open and scroll to the comment form. To leave a comment on an entire page, click the link to “Comments on the whole page” in the right–hand column. To leave general comments on the entire text, click the ‘single speech bubble’ icon in the navigation bar.
If you’re focussed on reading comments on paragraphs, this is more easily done by clicking the headers in the “Comments” column; each section will then open at the first comment. If you’re reading comments on an iPad, use two–finger scrolling in this column. Commentpress features live posting and updating of comments, so you don’t have to refresh the page to see what’s being said by others.
The main text column and the comments column can be made to occupy proportionally different widths of the page by dragging the right–hand border of the text column. If you’d like less screen clutter, you can close the page header by clicking on the ‘up–and–down’ arrow icon at the far right of the navigation bar (click the icon again to reopen).
To view the table of contents, click the ‘open book’ icon to the right of the navigation bar, which will make a table of contents appear in the right–hand column (if it isn’t already there). Each section of the book appears as a page in the table of contents; you can simply page backward and forward through the text by using the arrows above the text column in the navigation bar.
Commentpress also presents two innovative ways of reading comments on the text. By clicking on the ‘double speech bubble’ icon in the navigation bar, you can read comments–by–page; in the list of pages, ordered by number of contents, clicking on the page title will cause the comments to expand, and clicking on “Comment” in each comment’s header will allow you to see that comment in its original context. By clicking on the people icon in the navigation bar, you can read comments–by–author, with the same functionality as for comments–by–page.
The ‘thumbtack’ icon will take you to the book’s community blog; any registered user can post questions or thoughts to the blog for discussion by the broader readership.
Commentpress is also strong on accessibility; it uses valid, semantic markup; it allows navigation around the page with the keyboard; all functionality works with or without Javascript being enabled, making it compatible with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
