Quarto

Published

May 18, 2025

This document describes more of the reasons why we decided to and recommend using Quarto for building websites to be hosted on GitHub.

Needs

Creating websites is an increasingly common need for researchers as they are expected or required to make more of an effort to communicate their research, share with others, and be more visible to others. These are some situations where researchers highly benefit from or even need a website:

  • When making a software tool for a statistical method, the software will be much more likely used if there is a website that describes how to use it.
  • When collaborating with multiple people on a specific lab method, clinical procedure, or workflow, it is much easier to write the instructions and guidelines in a website format so that it is easier for the collaborators to read and stay up to date.
  • When making a course or workshop, it is extremely helpful to the participants to have a website that they can open and follow along.
  • When running an event like a conference or seminar, putting the program and other relevant information on a website can make it much easier for the event participants to find the information they need.

Aside from the use cases above, when creating websites there are some additional needs we need to, or at least would like to, fulfill:

  • We need to follow the law, for instance around GDPR. While we don’t fall under the Danish web accessibility law as the website is not targeted to the general public, we still aim to ensure that more people are able to read or navigate the website in an accessible way.
  • We want the tool we use to create websites to be a tool that is commonly used by researchers in their own work, so they don’t have to learn a whole other tool just to create a website.
  • The tool should be fairly easy to use.

How Quarto fits our needs

Quarto is a tool that is very commonly used by researchers using R and RStudio, but also increasingly by researchers using Python. Because it integrates very well with doing data analysis and creating reproducible reports, many researchers including at Steno Aarhus are already using it. So using Quarto to create a website is a more gentle learning experience than using a completely different tool.

Quarto uses a widely used website theme generator called Bootstrap and includes fully-developed themes from Bootswatch. This means that it is easy to create an engaging and fully functional website that is easy to navigate and use, thus already fulfilling many of the requirements for accessibility.

Since Quarto is a static HTML website generator, it doesn’t include any dynamic content that would require a database, or running code in the browser with JavaScript, or other server-side processing. That means that from the start, it is secure, fast, reliable, and doesn’t (can’t) collect any data. As a result, the researcher doesn’t have to worry about GDPR or other data privacy issues.

Quarto uses Markdown, which is a simple and easy-to-learn markup language that is widely used by researchers. This means that researchers can easily create and edit the content of the website. Markdown is widely used on the internet for things like forums, blogs, or social media posts. And because Quarto uses Markdown, which is a plain text format, it is easy to use with GitHub making it easy to build automated scripts to run checks on the files.

Quarto includes many built-in accessibility features, such as adding alternative text to images, ARIA labels, and semantic HTML. Since it generates static HTML files with no dynamic elements, it is much easier for screen readers and other assistive technologies to read and navigate the website.

Accessibility

Accessibility is an important topic for us. But it’s also an incredibly complicated area, and it’s difficult or near-impossible to address all possible accessibility aspects.

Like all website tools or services, Quarto on its own can’t incorporate all aspects of accessibility. Many things require manual editing. Things we at Steno Aarhus do to help improve accessibility are:

  • We use a custom theme that is designed to be as compliant as possible with the web accessibility guidelines as well as with GDPR rules (e.g. not loading resources from services that do collect personal data, such as Google). This theme is available at the steno-aarhus/sdca-theme.

  • We have guides that explain how to write Markdown files in a way that is as accessible as possible. The main things website authors need to include are alternative text for images, turning on closed caption for videos (which is easy for e.g. YouTube videos), and writing Markdown in a consistent and structured way.

  • Link rot is a problem that affects all websites, but especially those that are not maintained. This is something that is difficult to avoid even using the “best” software and services. Because Markdown files are plain text, we can easily create an automated script to do very basic checks on our repositories to check for broken links and give a warning if there are any.

Conclusion

We chose to use Quarto for making our Steno Aarhus websites, since it’s a powerful and flexible tool for creating websites that is easy to use and accessible. It is a great choice for researchers who want to create a website for their research, as they are already likely using Quarto for their data analysis and paper writing. Since it integrates so well with GitHub as well as other tools, it makes maintaining and updating content very easy and straightforward.

Note

This website and the documents contained within are aimed at researchers, PhD students, staff, and external collaborators.