Honest Labels: What the Locale Switcher Actually Does

This week's work was mostly about closing the gap between what our interface claims and what it does. Take the locale switcher. Its aria-label used to describe the control in a generic way. Now it's keyed to the actual target locale — the label tells you where the button will send you, not a vague notion of "change language." We added an end-to-end test (locale-switcher.spec.ts) so this stays true, because a claim you don't verify is just a hope.

The blog index had a similar honesty problem. It was surfacing posts in locales where the content didn't genuinely exist — a title in German linking to English body text, for example. We scoped the index, tag pages, and prev/next navigation to posts that actually have content in the requested locale, and wrote a test (blog-locale-filter.test.ts) to pin the behavior. If you want to know whether it works, run the test; don't trust the prose.

Alongside that: we raised amber text contrast to meet WCAG AA in five spots, cleaned up the navigation (Forum moved from the main nav to a footer link), and clarified a small but real distinction in the Hautrein guide — Schnaps versus Likör, which are not the same thing and shouldn't be described as if they were. Small fixes, but each one narrows the distance between the map and the territory.