This is an updated copy of the existing literature-audited comparative vertebrate biomechanics site. All research proposals, references, existing demo pages, imagery, and research-foundation framing are retained.
New landing-page features
Glass-clinging gecko enters once on page load, lands at the center, holds for approximately half a second, and exits. Its element is removed when the animation ends.
Rain droplets attached to the rainforest-background glass layer. Droplets are lightweight CSS gradients with occasional small drips, concentrated away from the text.
Flying birds cross the rainforest header with randomized positions, headings, sizes, and flights. Bird animations stop when the hero moves out of view or the tab is hidden; at most four are present simultaneously.
Rainforest ambience with soft musical pads, a self-contained 32-second MP3 loop synthesized for this site. There are no external audio URLs or third-party music licenses. Sound is kept low and can be muted by the user in the header.
Autoplay behavior
Browsers generally prevent unmuted autoplay. Sound starts at the first visitor gesture permitted by the browser, or when the user presses Play rainforest sound. It pauses when the tab is hidden. It will not force playback after the visitor deliberately mutes it.
Accessibility and performance
All decorative graphics have aria-hidden="true" and do not intercept pointer events.
The audio toggle has an accessible label, pressed state, and visible focus treatment.
prefers-reduced-motion: reduce disables the gecko’s entrance, bird flights and moving droplets.
New files are packaged locally: no animation libraries, fonts, CDN, or external services.
Changed files
research-directions/index.html — new overlay containers, audio button, audio element and asset references.
Upload/merge the contents of research-directions/ over the existing /research-directions/ directory in GitHub Pages or the actual hosting repository. Keep the relative assets/ directory; do not upload only index.html. All three direction-* demos remain included and unchanged.
Validation
JavaScript passed node --check.
New asset paths and all three demo link targets were verified against the packaged folder.
Audio format, duration and bitrate were verified with ffprobe.
A headless browser end-to-end screenshot test was attempted, but this environment’s Chromium navigation policy blocked even localhost/file URLs. Therefore cross-browser visual behavior should be checked on a deployed preview before public release.