ANUHub (prototype)

This is an original prototype inspired by ANUHub, ANU’s real student administration portal — it is not a clone and doesn’t reuse any of its code. It borrows one real pain point from that site: several of its menus (course enrolment, special consideration, fee payment, and so on) are only open during specific windows, and outside those windows there’s no clear way to tell when a menu reopens short of guessing or emailing Student Central.

Here, every menu item in the nav is checked against a single source of availability data. An item that’s currently open renders as a normal link. An item that isn’t renders as a disabled, unfocusable button — not a link with a fake disabled look — so it can’t be clicked, tapped, or reached by keyboard, and it carries a hint stating exactly when it opens next: an exact date and time if both are known, a date alone if the time isn’t, or “Currently unavailable” if there’s no known reopening date at all. Visiting a closed page’s URL directly shows the same message instead of its content, so the gating isn’t just a nav trick.

The one flow that’s actually wired end to end is Special Consideration (currently open): submitting a request writes it to SQLite and the new request appears in every other open tab immediately over a server-sent-events stream, and it’s still there after a reload.

What good looks like here

• One source of truth for availability (src/lib/menu.ts): every menu item’s opening/closing date and time lives there, as Sydney-local wall-clock strings, and nowhere else. No page or component hardcodes a date — grep -rn "2026-" src/pages finds nothing.
• Timezone correctness without DST arithmetic (src/lib/availability.ts): rather than converting Sydney-local times to UTC instants (which requires reasoning about the AEST↔AEDT switch), now and every bound are converted to the same Sydney wall-clock representation and compared as strings. spec/availability.test.ts covers the edge cases this is for: a menu opening exactly today, a menu with no known reopening date, and the actual instant either side of a Sydney-local midnight that isn’t UTC midnight.
• Real disabled semantics, not a faked one: unavailable items are native <button disabled> elements, which are unclickable, untappable, and unfocusable by keyboard for free, with no ARIA state management to get wrong. spec/menu-availability.test.ts checks this against the running app, not just the source.
• Judgement calls left open: the exact visual treatment of a disabled item (colour, spacing) is unenforced by any check — that’s a look call, not a correctness one. Which five menu items exist and what their windows are is seed data chosen to exercise the brief’s edge cases, not a claim about the real site’s actual opening hours.

Images go in public/ and are linked relatively — ![alt](public/before.png) — which renders on GitHub and at /readme/ alike.