How this site reads for a keyboard, a screen reader or a magnifier

Unplug the mouse and the catalogue still works. Tab moves through the thirteen rows and three columns of all thirteen places at all three lengths in the order the eye reads them, Enter opens a place, and the form at the foot of every page can be filled and sent without a pointing device at any stage. That was established by doing it, in three browsers, rather than by running a checking tool across the markup and taking the number it handed back.

Where a measure below carries a figure, that figure came off the rendered page rather than out of the stylesheet, since a color set in one file and washed over in another rarely arrives at the value it left.

The measures, and what each was measured at

The reflow test was run twice, at 320 pixels and again at 400 percent zoom, because the first takes the width away and the second enlarges the type inside whatever width is left.

Where this site still gets in the way

Four faults are known today, and naming them is more use than a badge would be.

First, the matrix on a narrow screen. Wide, it is a grid with thirteen row headings and three column headings, and a screen reader names the place and the length before it reads a figure, which is right. Below 700 pixels it restacks into thirteen blocks, and in that form the words week, three weeks and season are spoken again in every block. Accurate, and wearying to hear. A shorter spoken label for the stacked form is being written.

Second, the place tiles set their caption over the photograph. Contrast there rests on a dark wash laid across the image, and on two of the thirteen pictures the wash arrives thinner than it was set, measuring about 4.2 to 1 where the rest of the site holds above 7 to 1. Those two pictures are being taken again rather than darkened further, which is why the fault still stands.

Third, the date boxes in the request form hand over to whatever date control the browser supplies, and those controls differ. On at least one, the keyboard route into the calendar is hard to find. A date typed as plain words is accepted by the field and understood by the person who reads it, so that is the route to use until a control written here replaces the borrowed one.

Fourth, the thirty-nine figures live in the table and nowhere else. A reader who would rather have the whole grid as one plain list, top to bottom, has no page to go to for it. Until there is one, ask by email or by telephone and the list comes back as plain text in the body of a message.

This page makes no claim of conformance to any published standard. The work above was done against a plain question, which is whether a reader can get to a figure and send a request, and it was tested by hand rather than certified. Writing it up as conformance would say more than has been checked.

Telling this office that a page has failed you

If a page defeats you, corrections@slowlatitudes.com reaches the person who edits these pages, and a note saying which page and what happened is enough to work from. If it is easier said aloud, +1 (225) 766-2418 is answered by somebody who can read any cell of the grid out to you, take your dates down, and send the same written figure the screen would have shown. A note arriving either way gets its answer within one business day. What happens once a figure is agreed is set out in what people write in to ask, and the questions asked before one is quoted are listed in request a stay quote 24/7.

The form below is the one every page carries. It was walked with a keyboard and listened to field by field, and its labels say what each box is for.