How this site is built to be read before you reserve

The catalog leans on one small drawing, and a drawing is no use to a reader who cannot see it. So this page sets out that whole scale in words, describes what has been done for keyboard and screen reader users, names two things that still need work, and says where to send a complaint.

The rule, and why it never travels alone

Every week in the catalog carries a number from one to four. It says how much of that week you could have arranged without this office. On the page that number is drawn as a short rule of fixed length, cut into that many pieces: one unbroken stroke, or a stroke with one break in it, or two breaks, or three. The length of the rule stays the same at every step. So does its thickness. The only thing that changes is how many times it has been cut.

A drawing is worth nothing to a reader who cannot see it, so here is the entire scale in words.

One piece, no break: you could arrange all of this week yourself. Every part of it is open to reserve directly by anybody with an internet connection and a free evening.

Two pieces, one break: you could arrange most of it yourself. One or two parts are fiddly, and those parts are the whole of what the office adds.

Three pieces, two breaks: the hard half needs a telephone call. Much of the week is open to anyone, but a substantial piece of it depends on somebody picking up.

Four pieces, three breaks: it does not exist without an introduction. Where a supplier does not already know the office, that week cannot be assembled at all.

The rule this site follows is short. Wherever the mark appears, the number is also written out in words beside it, on all thirty two weeks, with no exceptions and nothing to hover over. A mark that cannot be read aloud is not allowed to carry information here. Delete every drawing from the site and the catalog still tells you the same thing in sentences. The reason is not theoretical: a meaning that lives only in the way something looks reaches nobody who is not looking straight at it.

Headings, links, pictures and six fields

Headings run in their real order. One heading opens the page, the sections beneath it sit one level down, and nothing is skipped to make a line come out the right size. Skim the headings alone and you have the shape of the page.

Every photograph carries a written description of what is actually in the frame, written for somebody who will never see it. Those descriptions say what the picture shows, not how it feels. Where a picture would be decoration and nothing else, there is no picture.

Links are written so the words themselves say where they lead. A link to the list of all thirty two weeks says that is where it goes. Nothing here says click here, and no link is called more, because more is not a destination.

The request form has six fields. Five of them you can see, and each of those has a label joined to the field, rather than a gray word sitting inside the box that vanishes the moment you type. The sixth is a decoy for automated submissions: it is kept out of the tab order and out of what a screen reader announces, so it should never reach you at all. Tab moves through the form in the order the fields are read out. The field you are in is outlined visibly. Everything can be sent from the keyboard. Fields that are needed are described as needed in words, not marked by color alone.

Color is never the only thing that distinguishes anything on this site. Text can be enlarged in the browser without the layout coming apart: the page reflows into a single column, and nothing is cut off or buried under something else. Nothing moves by itself. There is no carousel, nothing flashing, no video or sound that starts on its own, no box arriving over the page to ask you a question, no counter running down. If something on your screen is moving, it did not come from us.

With scripting switched off

These are plain HTML pages. Turn scripting off in your browser and the three questions still work, because each answer is an ordinary link to an ordinary page. The flat list of all thirty two weeks is a page like any other. Every week's own page, every starting price, every number and the sentence that states it, the whole of the request form: all of it arrives in the first response from the server, and none of it waits for a script to draw it.

One thing is genuinely plainer without scripting. When scripting is on, the form tells you about an empty field as soon as you leave that field. With scripting off, the same check happens after you send, and the answer comes back as a line of text at the top of the form. Fewer interruptions while you type, one extra trip if you have missed something.

What has not been checked, and how to tell the office

Nobody outside this office has audited this site. No conformance to a published accessibility standard is claimed anywhere on it, at any level, because no independent person has tested it and the office is not going to award itself a pass.

What can be said is how the pages are built. They are plain HTML, so the order things are read out in, and the order the tab key moves in, is the order they sit in the page: first link to send button, with nothing pulled out of sequence to make the layout come right. Everything that can be reached with a mouse can be reached from the keyboard, and the field you are in is outlined visibly. Every photograph carries a written description, and the number on every week is written out in words beside the drawing, so nothing here depends on seeing a picture or a mark. The layout is set in relative units and reflows into one column as the browser text is enlarged, rather than being pinned to a fixed width. None of that is the same thing as somebody sitting down with reading software and going through the site page by page, and this page is not going to describe it as though it were.

Two limits are worth knowing about before you meet them. The mark for the number is drawn at a fixed size and does not grow when you enlarge the text, so at large sizes it sits small next to a large sentence. Nothing is lost, since the sentence carries the number, but the pairing looks odd and it is on the list to fix. The second limit is the shortlists: on a narrow screen the four weeks stack one under another instead of standing side by side, so comparing them means traveling up and down the page rather than across it. Same order, more scrolling.

If any of this stops you reading the site or sending a request, tell the office and it will be fixed. Write to 6317 N Antioch Rd, Suite 108, Gladstone, MO 64119, or telephone +1 (816) 414-3106. Say which page it was and what happened, and, if you know it, what you were using to read the page. A request for a week can always be made by telephone or by letter instead of through the form. The form is a convenience, not a gate.