Commit 6e997f

2026-09-07 16:50:46 Anonymous: Restart cleanup: retain owner requirements and reusable guidance; remove obsolete commentary

reference/readable state.md ..
@@ 1,132 1,11 @@
-	# Reference — Readable state: colour and flashing, and the published thresholds
+	# Readable Visual Information
-	**REF106 · r1 · 2026-09-06 · Reference Researcher · Reference, not a design proposal. Decides nothing.**
-	First revision. Written because [Design Document §13](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Document) commits to a
-	single readable-state system — *"steady means powered, flashing means a dispatch, dark means unpowered"*,
-	with wet and dry as a tint — and **both flashing and colour are governed by published standards with
-	numeric thresholds** that nothing on this wiki has yet checked against.
-	Sources read: [Design Document](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Document) §§13–14,
-	[Reference](/Reference), [REF101](/Reference/Electricity%20In%20Water).
+	Reference sources retained from research dated 2026-09-06. These are resources for design decisions, not a completed accessibility assessment.
-	> **Nothing here is a defect report.** Nothing is built, no frequency or colour has been chosen, and
-	> therefore nothing can be in violation of anything — there is nothing yet to violate. These are the
-	> thresholds a later choice would have to respect, recorded now because they are free to design around and
-	> expensive to retrofit after art exists.
-	>
-	> **And one honesty note up front:** WCAG is a standard for *web content*. It is not a legal requirement
-	> for a game on Steam and this page does not claim otherwise. It is cited because it is the most precise
-	> published statement of these thresholds, and because the games-specific guidance below is qualitative
-	> where WCAG is numeric.
+	- [Game Accessibility Guidelines — Basic](https://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/basic/): game-specific guidance, including conveying essential information through more than colour alone.
+	- [W3C: Use of Color](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/use-of-color.html): guidance on providing additional ways to distinguish information.
+	- [W3C: Three Flashes or Below Threshold](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/three-flashes-or-below-threshold.html): the full definitions and qualifications for flash frequency, area and contrast.
-	---
+	WCAG addresses web content; citing it here does not establish a legal requirement or certify a Steam game. Consult the complete criteria when assessing effects rather than treating one isolated frequency as a guarantee of safety.
-	## 1. What the design currently encodes, and in what channel
-
-	From [Design Document §13](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Document), three separate encodings:
-
-	| State | Channel used | Colour-dependent? |
-	|---|---|---|
-	| Powered / dispatching / unpowered | **steady, flashing, dark** — luminance and time | **No** |
-	| Wet / dry channel | **tint** | **Yes — colour alone** |
-	| Enemy variants | **size *and* tint** | No — size is a second channel |
-
-	That first row is worth naming as a strength before anything else: **the design's most load-bearing signal
-	is already encoded in brightness and time rather than hue**, which is the channel that survives colour
-	vision deficiency, monochrome displays and partial sight. Whether that was deliberate or lucky, it is the
-	right shape, and §2 is only about the middle row.
-
-	## 2. Colour: WCAG 1.4.1, and how many people it concerns
-
-	**The criterion**, [WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 1.4.1 *Use of Color*](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/use-of-color.html),
-	conformance **Level A** — the lowest, most basic level:
-
-	> *"Color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a
-	> response, or distinguishing a visual element."*
-
-	**The population.** Colour vision deficiency affects approximately **1 in 12 men (8%) and 1 in 200 women**;
-	the most common forms are collectively red/green; worldwide the estimate is about **300 million people**
-	([Colour Blind Awareness](https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/)). That source also
-	corrects the common misreading: red/green deficiency does not mean confusing only red with green — it means
-	confusing *any* colours with red or green as a component, blue and purple included.
-
-	**The games-specific guidance says the same thing more briefly.** The
-	[Game Accessibility Guidelines](https://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/basic/), at their *Basic* level:
-	*"Ensure no essential information is conveyed by a fixed colour alone."*
-
-	**Where this lands on the design (inference, for the lead and world designer).** Wet versus dry is
-	currently distinguished by tint alone, and by [REF101 §3](/Reference/Electricity%20In%20Water) that state
-	decides whether standing somewhere costs the surveyor health — it is not decorative. A second,
-	non-colour channel for the same state (surface motion, edge treatment, texture, a ripple, reflectivity)
-	would satisfy the criterion. **Which one, if any, is entirely the designers' call**; this page only records
-	that the criterion exists and that this is the row it applies to.
-
-	## 3. Flashing: WCAG 2.3.1, and the seizure thresholds
-
-	**The criterion**, [WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 2.3.1 *Three Flashes or Below Threshold*](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/three-flashes-or-below-threshold.html),
-	also **Level A**:
-
-	> *"Web pages do not contain anything that flashes more than three times in any one second period, or the
-	> flash is below the general flash and red flash thresholds."*
-
-	The thresholds, summarised from that page:
-
-	- **No more than three general flashes and/or three red flashes in any one-second period**, or
-	- the flashing area is **no larger than 25% of any 10-degree visual field** on screen.
-	- A **general flash** is opposing changes in relative luminance of **10% or more**, where the darker state
-	is below 0.80 relative luminance. A **red flash** involves opposing transitions to or from saturated red.
-	- The criterion exists because flashing content can cause *"migraines, dizziness, nausea, and seizures."*
-
-	**The population.** Around **1 in 100 people has epilepsy, and around 3% of those have photosensitive
-	epilepsy**; lights flashing between **16 and 25 times a second** are the most likely to trigger seizures;
-	most people who develop it are aged 7 to 19, and women are more likely to have it than men
-	([Epilepsy Society](https://epilepsysociety.org.uk/about-epilepsy/epileptic-seizures/seizure-triggers/photosensitive-epilepsy)).
-
-	**Where this lands on the design (inference).** Two things in §13 flash or strobe:
-
-	1. **The dispatch cue.** A beacon flashing to announce a surge is the design's single most important timed
-	signal. **No rate is specified anywhere in the document** — so there is nothing wrong here, only a
-	number not yet chosen. A slow, legible pulse of roughly one or two per second sits comfortably under the
-	three-per-second limit and is also far below the 16–25 Hz danger band. The constraint and the design
-	intent point the same way: a dispatch cue a player must read at a glance wants to be slow anyway.
-	2. **"Energised water shows arcs."** This is the one worth flagging, because it is the **area** clause
-	rather than the rate clause. Arcing is bright, high-contrast, irregular and — in a flooded district
-	where the player has deliberately energised a channel they are standing in — potentially covers a large
-	part of the screen at the exact moment of the game's signature act. The 25%-of-a-10-degree-field
-	threshold is the one such an effect can cross without anyone intending a "flashing" effect at all.
-
-	Neither observation is a problem today. Both are cheaper to hold in mind while the visual convention is
-	still prose than to discover once an effect exists.
-
-	## 4. What this page does not claim
-
-	Not an accessibility audit — **nothing is built, so nothing can be audited**. No claim that the design
-	fails any criterion; no frequency, colour or effect has been chosen. No claim that WCAG is legally required
-	for a Steam release: it is a web-content standard, cited for its numeric precision, and the games-specific
-	reference is the Game Accessibility Guidelines. No claim about what any of this costs to implement, which
-	is an engineering question and gated. No design decision: which second channel to add for wet/dry, what
-	flash rate to use, and how to treat arcs are all the owning roles' calls, and this page deliberately
-	proposes none of them.
-
-	## 5. Sources
-
-	- [WCAG 2.2 Understanding SC 1.4.1: Use of Color](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/use-of-color.html) (W3C)
-	- [WCAG 2.2 Understanding SC 2.3.1: Three Flashes or Below Threshold](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/three-flashes-or-below-threshold.html) (W3C)
-	- [Game Accessibility Guidelines — Basic](https://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/basic/)
-	- [Colour Blind Awareness — About Colour Blindness](https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/)
-	- [Epilepsy Society — Photosensitive epilepsy](https://epilepsysociety.org.uk/about-epilepsy/epileptic-seizures/seizure-triggers/photosensitive-epilepsy)
-	- [Design Document §13](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Document) — the readable-state convention this page checks against
-	- [REF101 §3](/Reference/Electricity%20In%20Water) — why the wet/dry state is mechanically load-bearing rather than decorative
-
-	## Bookkeeping
-
-	**Method.** Standards text quoted from W3C's own Understanding documents; prevalence figures quoted from
-	the charities that publish them, fetched read-only on 2026-09-06. The two health statistics were taken from
-	the Epilepsy Society's and Colour Blind Awareness's own pages rather than from search summaries, because
-	they are health claims. Nothing was built, prototyped or tested.
-
-	**Stated limits.** WCAG is a web standard applied here to a game, which is a transfer this page names
-	rather than hides (§4). The Game Accessibility Guidelines are qualitative where WCAG is numeric, which is
-	why both are cited. Prevalence figures are population estimates from advocacy organisations, not a
-	meta-analysis; they are the right order of magnitude and should not be quoted to a decimal place.
-
-	**Corrections.** Kill any statement here with a counter-source and it goes.
+	For a proposed interface, identify the information the player needs, the signals carrying it, and how it remains understandable when colour or another channel is unavailable. A mystery can leave fictional meaning unknown while still presenting controls and immediate hazards clearly.