A booking office that cannot take your request is not a booking office. Everything on this site leads to one form, and if a person cannot reach that form with the equipment they use, the office loses the request and the person loses the trip. So the work described below was done for a practical reason before it was done for a principled one.
Amber Almanac is a booking office in Lincoln, NE. It places reservations with whoever runs the trip, and that firm invoices you under the contract you accepted with it. Nothing here asks for a card number, so no part of this page is about a payment screen. There is no payment screen.
What was built and checked
- Keyboard
- Every link, form field, button and expandable section works from the keyboard alone. Forward on Tab, backward on Shift with Tab, and Enter or Space to act. Nothing on the site requires a mouse, a hover or a drag.
- Focus outline
- The item holding focus carries a solid outline of three pixels with a one pixel gap around it, drawn in a tone that stays visible on both the pale page and the darker bands. The browser default was not removed and then forgotten.
- Skip link
- The first thing focus lands on is a link that jumps straight past the navigation to the start of the page content. It becomes visible the moment it takes focus.
- Heading order
- Each page has exactly one level one heading and the levels below it descend one step at a time. No heading level is skipped to obtain a smaller typeface.
- Contrast
- Body text measures at least 7.4 to 1 against its background, and no text anywhere on the site falls below 4.7 to 1. Prices, trip names and the response times are set in the same weight as body text rather than a thin grey.
- Reflow
- At 400 percent zoom on a 1280 pixel wide window the text reflows into a single column with no sideways scrolling. Every price and duration figure remains readable at that size.
- Text spacing
- Increasing line height, letter spacing and word spacing through a browser extension or a user stylesheet does not clip or overlap any text.
- Photographs
- Each photograph carries a written description of what is in the frame: the place, the light, the season it was taken in. Bands that exist only as texture behind a heading are marked as decorative so a screen reader passes over them in silence.
- Form labels
- Every field on the request form has a label attached to it in the markup, never a placeholder pretending to be one. Where a field is required the words say so.
- Errors
- If a submission fails, the message names the field and says what to change. Focus moves to the first field that needs attention.
- Motion
- The few fade transitions are switched off entirely when the operating system is set to reduce motion. There is nothing that moves, scrolls, flashes or auto advances on its own.
- Language
- The page language is declared, so a screen reader reads American English pronunciation without being told.
- Zoom
- Pinch zoom is not disabled on phones or tablets.
How the five ordered lists are announced
This is the part of the site most likely to go wrong for somebody using a screen reader, so it was built with more care than anything else here.
The same twenty four trips appear in five orders, at all five orderings. An order is a fact, not a recommendation, and the office does not pick one for you.
Each ordering is one list, marked up as an ordered list, so a screen reader announces how many trips are in it and which number it is reading. Before the list begins, a short paragraph states in plain words what the list is sorted by and in which direction, for example that beds slept in runs from a single base to a room a night. That sentence is read aloud like any other sentence, because a sorted list that does not say what it is sorted by is a puzzle.
Every trip in a list is one list item containing a heading, the sorting figure written out in words and numerals, and a link to the trip. The figure is never carried by position alone. A trip that sits high in the on foot ordering says four miles on an average day in its own text, so the fact survives being read out of sequence, copied, or found by search.
The five orderings are also linked to one another from inside each one. Where a trip appears in a second list, the link text says which list it leads to rather than repeating the word here. There is no widget that reorders the page underneath somebody, and no control that changes the sort without changing the address. Each ordering is its own page with its own address, which means the back button behaves, the page can be bookmarked, and nothing is announced as changed while a reader is halfway down it.
Where this site still falls short
Two shortcomings are known and neither has been fixed yet.
The catalogue is long and the pages are long with it. Somebody reading the all five orderings pages with a screen reader passes through twenty four items to reach the end, and the only shortcut is the skip link at the top and the heading list their software builds. There is no filter, no jump menu and no way to hear only the trips under a certain figure. A sighted reader scans that in seconds. A reader using speech does not. Splitting each ordering into shorter sections with their own headings would fix it, and that work has not been done.
The reserved container for a fare lookup has not been tested with assistive software. A space is set aside on this site for a fare lookup that is not yet installed. When it arrives it will come from outside this office, and until it is in place and has been operated with a keyboard and a screen reader from beginning to end, nothing about its behavior is being claimed here. If it turns out to be unusable, it will be taken out rather than left in place with an apology next to it.
Two smaller things, said plainly. Some trip descriptions run to figures set close together, and a few readers have found dense number runs harder to follow by ear than by eye. And no formal audit by an outside tester has been carried out: the checks above were made in this office, with a keyboard, with speech software, and at 400 percent zoom, which is honest testing but is not the same as an independent one.
Telling this office about a barrier
Write to errata@amberalmanac.com and describe what you were trying to do, which page you were on, and what your equipment did instead. If you know the browser and the screen reader, that shortens the work considerably. If you do not, the report is still worth sending.
Whatever arrives is opened by somebody at this desk before that working day is out, and you get a written reply naming what was found. If the fix is small it is usually made within five working days. If it is structural, the reply says so, says what it involves, and gives a date to check back on rather than a promise with no edge to it.
You may also reach the office by telephone at (402) 488-6215 if writing is not practical for you, and a request made that way is treated exactly as one made in writing.
- Written to
- errata@amberalmanac.com
- Booking requests
- sightline@amberalmanac.com
- Telephone
- (402) 488-6215
- Office
- 6940 O Street, Suite 210, Lincoln, NE 68510
- Company
- Amber Almanac Bookings LLC, filed with the Nebraska Secretary of State
If a barrier stopped you reserving a trip, say which trip. The office will take the request over the telephone or by mail and put it through by hand, and no part of the process changes because it arrived a different way.