Using This Site

The thing that is unusual here

This paper does not animate.

Nothing waits to be scrolled into view, nothing fades, and there is no observer watching the page to decide when a block has earned its appearance. That is a deliberate choice rather than an omission: an animation that reveals text is a promise that a script will keep, and a paper should not need one kept.

The practical consequence is that everything is present the instant the markup lands, in every browser, with or without a script, at any connection speed.

Three things the script does do

It arms the letter button. That button arrives switched off and the script turns it on, because every check on a letter lives in the script and a button that sends unchecked text is worse than a button that does nothing. Beside it sits a note carrying the mail address and the telephone number, which reach the same two people.

It keeps a return date from falling before a departure. That is the only wrong answer the fare search can produce unaided, so the field stops offering it instead of complaining afterwards.

It arms the fare search and builds the query. That button also arrives switched off. The booking service reads one packed line rather than a set of separate fields, and building that line is the script's job, as is offering the airport codes while a reader types. With no script the button stays out of use and a note beside it says so, because handing the service a line it cannot read would look like a search that simply failed.

Everything else on this site works with the script off. Every piece, every table and every policy is present the instant the markup lands.

Getting around on a keyboard

The first thing to receive focus on any page is a link that jumps past the masthead into the reading.

After that, every link, field and button is reachable in the order it appears, and focus is drawn as a three pixel outline in the paper's one accent, never suppressed. Nothing on this site opens, traps focus or has to be escaped from: the navigation is a row of links and behaves like one.

Under a screen reader

• One first level heading to a page. Levels beneath it descend one step at a time and never skip a rank.
• United States English declared on the document.
• Alternative text on every photograph, written from the photograph rather than from the instruction that produced it, and no fact anywhere that exists only inside a picture.
• Header cells on every table, including a header on each row, so a value is announced together with what it belongs to.
• A label on every field. The one hidden field catches automated submissions, sits outside the tab order and is hidden from assistive software.
• Errors announced beside the field that caused them and tied to it, rather than gathered into a summary somewhere else on the page.

Nothing depends on color

Unusual enough to be worth stating on its own.

The four access bands are encoded by the thickness of a horizontal rule, from a hairline to a heavy bar, and each band is spelled out in words immediately beside its rule. A reader who distinguishes no colors at all loses no information, and the pages come out correct on a black and white printer.

Contrast was measured for every pairing of ink against the background it actually sits on, page and card both, across all thirty one pages. The lowest is 4.75 to one, against the 4.5 the ordinary threshold asks for, and the large type passes the stricter one.

Bigger text, narrower screens

Type is set in relative units. At double size nothing overlaps, nothing is cut off and nothing is lost behind anything else.

Below a certain width the whole paper becomes a single column. Wide tables scroll inside a box of their own so that the page itself never moves sideways, and it does not, at any width we could produce.

Anything that can be tapped is at least forty four pixels across its short side, with one exception the standard itself allows: a link inside a sentence takes the height of the line it sits in, because pulling it out of the line would break the sentence.

Three honest shortcomings

1. On a phone the hairline and the three pixel rule look much the same. Since each band is also written in words, no information is lost, but the visual shorthand stops working at that size.
2. The widest table still needs a horizontal drag on a small screen. It happens inside its own box rather than moving the page, which is the better of two imperfect answers.
3. Testing was a keyboard and the tools to hand. That is a long way short of every browser against every screen reader, and we would rather say so than imply a lab.

Telling us

Send the page and what happened, to post@kestrelroads.com. Naming the browser and the assistive software makes it faster and is not required.

A barrier between somebody and the reading is treated here as a defect with a fix, not a preference to be weighed against other work.

Reviewed August 11, 2026.