Last month we told the story of GABLVM's first eight months: how a website that began as four pages and a promise grew into a full set of accessible Islamic tools, built from the ground up for blind and low-vision Muslims. This is the updated edition of that story, brought current through the middle of July 2026, with everything we have shipped, fixed, and learned since. It is written for everyone: the first half of each section is plain language, and there is a section near the end for readers who want the technical detail.
It started with a promise
On November 19, 2025, gablvm.org went live with four pages: Home, About Us, Programs and Services, and Contact Us. Before we built a single tool, we wrote the things that protect and respect the people we serve: a full Accessibility Statement, a Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, a Code of Conduct, and a Cookie Policy, all within the first week. Accessibility was not a finishing touch we planned to add later. It was the foundation we poured first. The house was small, but it was built right.
February brought the tools, just in time for Ramadan: the Quran Player with all 114 surahs and twenty reciters, Prayer Times with thirteen calculation methods for any location in the world, the Hijri Calendar, and forty published Ramadan events. Through the spring we connected the player to Quran.com accounts so bookmarks, notes, and reading streaks sync both ways, added the Qibla Finder and the Tafsir Lab, moved to faster infrastructure, and stood up a public status page. In June, version 4.0 brought site-wide dark mode, higher contrast, and zero accessibility violations at the WCAG 2.2 AA level across the site.
That was the story as of late June. Here is what has happened since.
A stronger engine, maintained around the clock
On July 1 the platform under the website was upgraded to Drupal 11.4, the newest release of the software that powers gablvm.org. Nothing changed in how the tools look or work; the win is under the hood, where every page is now built with far less database work, so the site stays fast as it grows.
Just as important is what happened after. The site now maintains itself: when the Drupal project publishes an update, our maintenance system applies it automatically, usually within hours. Since the upgrade it has applied three platform updates on its own, including a security-only release that fixed three vulnerabilities the Drupal security team rated moderately critical. That one was live on our site the same day it was published, with no downtime and no waiting for a human to notice.
The Quran Player's busiest month
July has been the player's biggest month of refinement since it launched. If you listen with the English audio translation, the improvements are hard to miss. Checking the translation box in the middle of a surah now continues from the verse you are on instead of replaying every translation from verse one. As of this week, that handoff is verse-exact: checking the box restarts the verse being recited and then translates it, and unchecking continues cleanly at a verse boundary, with none of the small forward drift some listeners noticed.
The player also learned to heal itself. On some iPhones and Androids, the audio engine that weaves English translations between verses could occasionally start up silent: the player looked like it was playing, but no sound came out. The player now notices that condition within about a second, restarts its audio engine, and carries on from the same spot. You may never see it happen, and that is the point.
Listeners who use VoiceOver got two more fixes: the two-finger double tap (Magic Tap) that pauses and resumes playback no longer misfires when iOS delivers the gesture twice, and the Continue Reading list on your account dashboard now resumes with the reciter you were actually listening to. Speaking of the dashboard: it now has a direct link back to the Quran Player, so you no longer have to travel through the site menu to get back to your listening.
Behind those headline fixes sits patient, unglamorous work: we have now run twelve deep reviews of the player's code, and the twelfth alone shipped twenty fixes in the player's less-traveled paths. None of this is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a tool you trust and one you do not.
Prayer Times that know where you are
Finding your location on the Prayer Times page got easier and more accurate. The country field is now a dropdown of 252 countries, so spelling no longer matters, and choosing a country reveals an optional state or region menu that narrows the search. The page also remembers your location properly now: type a city by hand and it is there on your next visit; use the Use My Location button and later travel somewhere new, and the page quietly notices and updates itself.
When something breaks, we tell you
On July 11 the site had its worst day so far: a maintenance page was shown to visitors for almost thirteen hours. We wrote up the whole story, plainly and without excuses, in a public postmortem, and then hardened the monitoring so the same failure cannot happen quietly again.
That transparency is not a one-off. Our status page now documents 78 incidents with full timelines, from major outages to small player bugs, each one investigated, fixed, and closed in public. And our changelog documents 39 releases, every one written twice: once in plain language for everyone, and once in technical notes for those who want the detail. If we fixed it, you can read about it.
Accessibility is still the whole point
The site continues to hold zero WCAG 2.2 AA violations, and we no longer take our own word for it: every week, two independent automated accessibility engines scan the site and report anything they find. Just as important, the screen reader users of this site report what the scanners cannot see, and every report makes the tools better. Security gets the same quiet attention: a web application firewall and a custom threat detection system watch the site around the clock, and July's fixes included making sure a single mistyped password can never lock a legitimate visitor out.
The numbers so far
- 114 surahs and 20 reciters in the Quran Player, with optional English audio translation.
- 13 prayer calculation methods, with a 252-country location picker.
- 39 releases documented in the public changelog.
- 78 incidents investigated and resolved in public on the status page.
- 12 deep code reviews of the Quran player and counting.
- Zero WCAG 2.2 AA violations, verified weekly by two independent engines.
For the technically curious
The July platform work moved the site from Drupal 11.3 to 11.4.4 across four releases, three of them applied unattended by an automated update watcher that runs every fifteen minutes and only acts on semver-safe releases. The Quran player's English translation runs on a Web Audio stitching engine that interleaves per-verse Arabic and English clips gaplessly; July's fixes gave it a render-clock watchdog that detects a frozen audio context and rebuilds it in place, and replaced a global duration-ratio mapping between the full-surah recording and the per-verse timeline with piecewise per-verse mapping from native timestamps, taking toggle handoff error from seconds to about ten milliseconds. The July 11 outage traced to a memory-limited maintenance process that left maintenance mode enabled after a crash; the fix raised the limit, hardened the wrapper, and added a probe that verifies the live site with a cache-busting request. Accessibility verification runs axe-core and WAVE on independent weekly schedules.
What is next
We are not finished. We never really will be, and that is the point. There is always another rough edge to smooth, another barrier to remove, and the to-do list is honest about both. But nearly nine months in, the promise from day one is keeping itself: a Muslim home on the web that a blind or low-vision person can use with dignity, comfort, and ease.
Thank you for being part of it. Try the tools, and if something gets in your way, tell us at [email protected]. We built this for you, and we are listening.