what works, what does not, and where to tell us it broke
Reading this site by keyboard or by ear
This is a small office and this page is written by the people who actually maintain the site. It lists what has been done, what has not, and what happens when you write to us about a problem.
Everything on this site is meant to work without a mouse, without images, and without color. The catalogue here is indexed by twenty-five wishes we do not arrange, so a visitor often has to move through two or three pages before reaching a trip. That is a lot of navigating, and navigating is exactly where a site of this kind usually falls apart. The list below is the state of it as we last checked, by hand, on a desktop browser with a keyboard and with a screen reader turned on.
Checked by hand, not by a scanner
Every link, button, form field and disclosure on the site can be reached with Tab and operated with Enter or the space bar. Nothing needs a hover, a drag or a long hold.
The focused item is drawn with a solid two pixel outline in a color that stays visible on all four background tones used across the site. The browser default is never removed and left empty.
The first Tab on any page reveals a link that jumps past the navigation strip to the start of the main content. It is visible while focused.
One h1 per page, and levels descend without skipping. There is no jump from h1 to h3 anywhere in the catalogue or on the house pages.
Each page carries a banner, a navigation region, a single main region and a footer region, so a screen reader user can jump between them directly.
Body text against its background measures at or above 7:1. Small print, captions and the footer measure at or above 5.4:1. Link text is distinguished by underline as well as color.
At 320 pixels wide, and at 400 percent zoom on a 1280 pixel screen, all content stays in one column with no sideways scrolling. Wide tables scroll inside their own box, not the page.
Line height, letter spacing and word spacing can be increased by a user stylesheet without text overlapping or being cut off.
Photographs of places carry a description of what is in the frame and where it is. Decorative bands and rules carry an empty alt attribute so they are skipped rather than announced.
Each box on the request form carries a label you can see tied to it in the markup, not a placeholder standing in for one. Required fields are marked in text as well as with an asterisk.
When a field is rejected, the message appears next to that field in words, is tied to the field for a screen reader, and the browser moves focus to the first problem.
The only movement on the site is a short fade on some sections as they come into view. With the reduced motion setting on in your operating system, that fade does not run and the content is simply there.
Pinch to zoom is not blocked on phones or tablets. Nothing is fixed to the top of the screen in a way that eats the view when magnified.
Each page declares American English, and each page title names its own subject before the office name, so a list of open tabs is readable.
Nothing on the site expires, counts down, refreshes itself, or takes an action if you sit still on a page.
Four things here that are not right yet
Four things are wrong, and we would rather write them down than let you find them one at a time.
The first is the wish index at the twenty-five requests and what we book instead. Twenty-five entries sit there, each one a thing we do not arrange paired with what we suggest instead, and the pairing is carried partly by layout. A screen reader reads it as a long run of headings and paragraphs, correctly but flatly, and the relationship between the two halves of an entry is thinner in speech than it is on screen. We have kept every pair as a heading followed by its own text so the order is at least never wrong, but somebody working through all twenty-five by ear is doing more work than somebody scanning them. A short summary sentence at the top of each entry is the fix, and it is not written yet.
The second is the small mark that appears beside each trip. It encodes how far the alternative sits from the popular thing you asked about, and it is a shape, not a number. Its meaning is given in words in a key at the foot of the catalogue, but on the trip page itself the mark carries information that only sighted users get at a glance. Anyone else has to find the key. We think the honest fix is to print the plain words next to the shape on every trip page, which will make the pages longer and is worth doing anyway.
The third is the reserved area on trip pages where a fare lookup will eventually sit. Right now it is an empty container with a line of text explaining that it is not working yet. When a lookup tool goes in there, it will be somebody else's code, and we cannot promise in advance that it will meet the standard the rest of the site meets. We will test it with a keyboard and a screen reader before it goes live, and if it fails we will say so on this page rather than quietly leave it in.
The fourth is honest but unsatisfying: our testing is narrow. Two people, two screen readers, one desktop operating system and one phone. We have not tested with voice control software, with a switch device, or with a braille display, and we have not put the site in front of a paid audit. So the list above describes what we found, not everything that is there.
When a page here is wrong
Write to corrections@willowmilepress.com and describe what happened. What helps most: the address of the page, what you were trying to do, what your computer or phone did instead, and the browser and assistive software you were using, including version numbers if you can find them. A sentence like "the focus disappears after the third field on the request form, Firefox with NVDA" is worth more to us than a long report, though a long report is welcome too.
This office keeps no counter hours and publishes none, because a printed opening time would be a promise about a person rather than about the work. What is promised instead is a deadline: every request that reaches the form is read in the order it arrived and answered within one business day, and if the answer needs longer than that you will get a note saying so and what it is waiting on.
Here is what we will do with it. Somebody reads every message that comes in and answers it before that working day is out, so you will get a human reply and not an acknowledgment slip. That first reply will say whether we already know about the problem, and if we do not, whether we can reproduce it. Where a fix is small, it goes live within a few days and we write back to tell you it is done. Where it is larger, we will tell you plainly what it involves and roughly when to expect it, and if the answer is that we cannot fix it soon, we will say that instead of going quiet. Anything we cannot fix quickly gets written into the section above, in its own words, so the next visitor is not surprised by it.
If the site itself is blocking you from doing the thing you came here to do, do not fight it. Call the office at +1 (314) 862-4517 during the working week and a person will take the same details a form would have taken and put the request through by hand. Nothing about a request made that way is treated differently, and nothing is lost. The same applies if you would rather not use a form at all: desk@willowmilepress.com reaches the same desk, and a request in your own words in an email is a perfectly good request.
Two things this page does not cover. We do not grade or score the places in the catalogue, and we do not offer opinions about them, so there is nothing here that a screen reader is missing in the way of a rating. And this statement is about the site only. Once you are traveling, the company running your trip has its own arrangements and its own accessibility, and we tell them about your requirements in writing when we place the reservation. What they can actually provide is described in the page of hard questions, along with the questions we ask them on your behalf before anything is confirmed.