How these pages behave with a keyboard, a screen reader, or text at four times its size

The twenty-six rows of the board, the twelve month pages behind it and the request form were built to be worked without a mouse, read aloud, enlarged, or restyled by a reader's own settings. Below is that work, and then four things still wrong.

Reaching every row from the keyboard

A skip link is the first thing that takes focus on any page, clearing the site banner and the navigation in one press. Tab order follows the markup, which is also the order the page reads in aloud. Every link, field and control is reached with Tab and worked with Return or the space bar.

Focus is drawn as a two pixel outline set two pixels clear of the element, in a color that works on both the paper and the dark ground of the board. Each board row is a single link whose spoken name carries the destination, the departure window and the figure, in that order, so a reader hears a price with each row rather than twenty-six titles and then a hunt for figures.

Headings, landmarks and the language of the page

Each page carries one first level heading and descends a step at a time beneath it, and every heading names the subject under it. The banner, the navigation, the body and the footer are marked as landmarks, and the month index announces twelve items before the first is read. American English is declared on every page, which sets the pronunciation rules a screen reader uses.

Contrast, and a mark that carries nothing on its own

Body text measures 13.9 to 1 against the paper, and links inside a paragraph are underlined as well as colored, so they survive stripped or inverted color.

Every board row carries a right angle mark whose orientation says how much slack the departure has, and beside it the same fact stands in words: one fixed date, a week of dates, any week in one named month, most of the year. It repeats those words on purpose: nothing here is carried by the turn of a stroke or by a color alone.

A 320 pixel window, and text at four times its size

Pages reflow at 320 CSS pixels across with one scroll direction and nothing clipped, and at 400 percent zoom the board stacks into rows and the month index into one column. Scaling is not blocked anywhere. Every date, figure and heading is real text rather than a picture of text, each photograph carries a description naming the place and its hour, and decoration carries an empty one so a reader passes over it.

The request form, and what it says when something is missing

Every field has a visible label joined to it, no placeholder stands in for one, and required fields say so in words. Name, email and telephone carry the standard hints for autofill.

When a field is refused, the message appears as a list at the head of the form, each entry linked to the field it belongs to, and focus moves there. No refusal is signalled by color alone, and the other fields keep what you typed. One field is hidden from sight and from screen readers together and sits outside the tab order, so it never turns up as a box nobody can explain. The form takes a request Whatever reaches the form is opened in the order it landed, and an answer goes back inside one working day., and an answer comes back within one business day.

Things that stay still

Nothing moves unless it is asked to: no panel opens by itself, no page refreshes or expires while it is read, no session times out. The one animation is a short fade as a section arrives, switched off for anyone whose system asks for reduced motion. With scripts off, every page renders whole.

What each measure was tested at

Four things that are still wrong

Place names in the twenty-six titles are not marked with their own language, so a screen reader applies American English rules and Höga Kusten and Réunion come out misshapen. Marking them one at a time is the next work here.

A keyboard user on the home page passes through all twenty-six rows to reach anything below the board, because the link at the top clears the navigation but not the board itself.

The board is built as a list of rows rather than a table with column headings, so a reader cannot cross it column by column or hear the word price before a figure. Reading order carries that instead, which works and is slower.

Nobody who uses a screen reader every day has been through this site. Everything above was checked by the people who built the pages, with a keyboard and two readers, which is a different thing.

Send anything that blocked you to corrections@thirdcoastdispatch.com, and it is answered within one business day and treated as a fault in the page. If a page defeats you outright, +1 (816) 525-2846 reaches this office, where the board is read down the line and a departure reserved by voice. The steps from there are at what happens between your note and a confirmed date, standing a reservation down at the note on changing a booking, and common questions at the awkward part of the file.