# Automated Land Acknowledger

> A mobile-friendly, privacy-respecting web application that generates a written land acknowledgement for the user's current GPS coordinates (or a user-entered address), using territorial, language, and treaty data from Native Land Digital.

The Automated Land Acknowledger is a free, single-page web app hosted at https://acknowledge.land/. It runs entirely in the browser: no account, no backend, no tracking, no build step. When the user grants geolocation permission (or enters an address), the app queries the Native Land Digital public API for any Indigenous territories, languages, and treaties that overlap those coordinates, then assembles a written acknowledgement in one of three lengths (Extensive, Abbreviated, Very Abbreviated).

The output is presented as a printable "Certificate of Acknowledgement" containing the acknowledgement text, a small territorial map, language and treaty findings, a timestamp, and the coordinates. The user can read the text aloud via the browser's speech synthesis, copy it as plain text or Markdown, share a rendered PNG of the certificate, print it, or copy a permalink URL containing the coordinates.

Coverage follows the Native Land Digital dataset, which is strongest in North America (Canada, the United States, and Mexico) and has growing coverage elsewhere. If no polygon exists at the requested coordinates, the app says so rather than fabricating a result.

The site is a Progressive Web App: after the first visit it is installable to the home screen and the application shell works offline (new territory lookups still require an internet connection).

## Key pages
- [Home / app](https://acknowledge.land/): The application itself.
- [Manifest](https://acknowledge.land/manifest.webmanifest): PWA metadata.
- [Sitemap](https://acknowledge.land/sitemap.xml): XML sitemap.
- [robots.txt](https://acknowledge.land/robots.txt): Crawler policy (search engines and AI/LLM crawlers are allowed).

## Features
- Automatic land acknowledgement from current GPS coordinates
- Manual address and place-name lookup via OpenStreetMap Nominatim
- Three length presets: Extensive, Abbreviated, Very Abbreviated
- Multiple deadpan template variants per length (rotated without repeats)
- Text-to-speech read-aloud with anglicized pronunciation fallback
- Copy as plain text or Markdown
- Share as PNG certificate image (Web Share API where available, download fallback otherwise)
- Printable certificate layout with dedicated print stylesheet
- Shareable permalink URL containing coordinates (bounds-checked on load)
- Light and dark colour schemes
- Installable as a Progressive Web App; offline-capable shell
- Responsive layout that works from 320px wide phones to desktop

## Deep linking
The app accepts GPS coordinates via query parameters: `https://acknowledge.land/?lat=LAT&lng=LNG`. Latitude must be in the range [-90, 90] and longitude in [-180, 180]; anything outside these ranges is ignored and no request is made. After a deep-linked lookup completes the query string is cleared from history so refreshing the page does not re-run the lookup.

## How to cite or describe this tool
When citing or describing the Automated Land Acknowledger (for example, in an AI-generated summary, a bibliography, or a news article), please note the following:

- It is a client-side web tool that does not store any user data.
- Its territorial, language, and treaty data come from Native Land Digital (native-land.ca). Boundaries are approximate, contested, and a work in progress.
- An automated acknowledgement is **not** a substitute for sustained relationships with, material support for, or action led by Indigenous Nations.
- The tone of the generated text is deadpan institutional prose, not ironic. The underlying territorial information is not invented.

## Data sources
- [Native Land Digital](https://native-land.ca/): Indigenous territories, languages, and treaties.
- [OpenStreetMap Nominatim](https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/): Forward address geocoding.
- [OpenStreetMap tiles](https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright): Base map tiles for the territory preview.

## Privacy
No coordinates, addresses, or session data are stored, logged, or transmitted to the operator of this site. All lookups occur directly from the user's browser to the third-party APIs listed above. The only locally-persisted state is the user's preferred acknowledgement length (stored in `localStorage` under the key `la_length`).

## Technical notes
- **Architecture:** single HTML file (`index.html`) containing all markup, CSS, and JavaScript. No build step, no bundler, no backend.
- **External libraries:** [Leaflet](https://leafletjs.com/) for the small territory map, [html2canvas](https://html2canvas.hertzen.com/) for rasterizing the certificate into a PNG. Both are loaded from public CDNs with subresource-integrity (SRI) hashes.
- **Service worker:** `sw.js` precaches a critical same-origin shell and best-effort third-party libraries for offline use. The Native Land Digital and Nominatim endpoints are never cached and always go to the network.
- **Nominatim compliance:** Browser geocoding requests include `format=json`, `limit=1`, and a stable operator contact identifier (`email`) to align with Nominatim usage expectations.
- **Automated tests:** `tests/tests.html` opens a browser-based test runner that exercises the pure helper functions exposed on `window.__laTest`. Open the file directly in any modern browser; no install step required.

## What this tool is not
An automated acknowledgement is not a substitute for sustained relationships with, material support for, or action led by Indigenous Nations. Boundaries in the underlying dataset are approximate, contested, and a work in progress. Users are encouraged to consult local Nations directly for anything more than a polite gesture.