What was built twice so it works either way

The whole point of Quiet Quarterly is that a person reads what you send and answers it. Nothing on this site needs to be filled in perfectly for that to happen. If any page below defeats you, the request form is not the only route: the address and telephone number in the footer of every page reach the same desk, and a request typed into an email in your own words is handled exactly like one that arrives through the form.

Things you can test in a minute

Keyboard, all of it

Every link, every field, the catalogue filters and the obstacle grid can be operated with Tab, Shift Tab, Enter and the arrow keys. There is no control that only responds to a mouse. | Focus you can actually see | The focused element gets a solid two pixel outline plus a background shift, so it stays visible over photographs and over the dark bands. It is never removed on click. | Skip link | The first Tab press on any page offers a link straight to the main content, past the header and the trip navigation. | Heading order | One h1 per page, then h2 and h3 in order with no levels skipped. The obstacle pages nest trip names under the obstacle they sit below. | Text size | Set your browser to 200 percent and the pages reflow to one column. Nothing is cut off, nothing needs sideways scrolling, and the price tables stack into labeled rows. | Contrast | Body text measures at least 7.0 to 1 against its background. The lightest thing on the site, the fine print under the request form, measures 5.8 to 1. Nothing relies on color alone to carry meaning. | Photograph descriptions | Each photograph carries a description of what is in the frame, written for that image. Decorative bands are marked as decorative so a screen reader passes over them instead of reading a filename. | Form labels | Every field on the request form has a visible label attached to it, not a placeholder standing in for one. Required fields say so in words next to the label, and errors appear as text above the field they belong to, not as a color change. | Motion | Two things move on this site: a slow fade as photograph bands come into view, and the catalogue filter animating open. Both stop entirely if your system is set to reduce motion. Nothing auto plays, nothing scrolls itself, nothing flashes. | Language and titles | Each page declares American English and carries a title that names the page before it names Quiet Quarterly, so a long tab list stays readable. | Zoom on a phone | Pinch zoom is not disabled. The layout works down to 320 pixels wide. | Time limits | There are none. The request form has no session that expires, and nothing on the site logs you out or clears what you typed after a delay.

The grid, and how it reads aloud

The catalogue here is not a list of twenty-two trips in order of anything. It is six obstacles crossed against twenty-two trips, and most trips sit under three or four obstacles at once. That shape is useful on a large screen and hostile to a screen reader if it is built as a picture of a table.

So it is built twice. The visual grid is a real table with row and column headers marked as headers, which means a screen reader can announce "short dates, Douro river weeks, works" rather than reading forty cells in a row and leaving you to count. Underneath, each obstacle also exists as its own page at /what-stops-you/ with the same information written as sentences, including the trips that fail that obstacle and the reason each one fails. If the table is unpleasant to move through, the six pages carry everything the table carries.

Where this site is still awkward

Two problems are real and neither has been fixed yet.

The obstacle grid is wide. On a screen narrower than about 900 pixels it becomes a horizontally scrolling region. It is reachable by keyboard and it announces itself as scrollable, but scrolling a table sideways with a keyboard is tedious work, and if you are magnifying the screen you will lose the row header off the left edge as you go. The six obstacle pages exist partly because of this, and if you are working at high magnification they are the better door. A proper fix, a version that stacks into blocks on a small screen, is the next accessibility change planned for this site.

Price information leans on the table too. $1,285 to $4,980 is the range across the catalogue, and the per trip figures live in a table with three columns: what the figure covers, what it does not, and the month it applies to. Read aloud, those three columns take a while before you reach the number you wanted. There is no plain sentence version of a trip price yet. Until there is, the fastest route to a figure for the dates you have in mind is the request form, where you can write the dates in a sentence and get a written figure back.

Two smaller things, said plainly rather than buried. Some photographs carry long descriptions that are less useful than they should be, because a caption written for a photograph of a harbor at dusk cannot tell you much that matters for choosing a trip. And the site has not been tested against every screen reader and browser pairing that exists. It has been checked with VoiceOver on Safari, NVDA on Firefox, and keyboard only operation in Chrome on Windows. Anything outside that list is untested, not verified.

Telling us something is broken

Write to plumbline@quietquarterly.com. Say what page you were on, what you were trying to do, and what happened instead. If you know what you are using, the browser and any assistive software help a great deal, but a message that says "the trip table on the going alone page will not let me get to the third column with a keyboard" is entirely enough to work from.

What happens then: the message is read by a person before the end of that working day, the same as any request that arrives here. You get a written reply naming the problem in the terms you described it, saying whether it is something that can be changed in the page or something built into how the site is put together, and giving a date by which the change will be live. If the answer is that it cannot be fixed soon, the reply says that instead of going silent, and it tells you the route around the barrier in the meantime.

There is one thing worth saying about scope. Quiet Quarterly Bookings LLC arranges bookings and places them with the company that runs the trip. That company's own booking pages, confirmation emails and check in systems are outside this site and outside what can be changed from here. If a barrier turns up in one of those places, tell plumbline@quietquarterly.com anyway. The office cannot rewrite another company's website, but it can carry your requirement to a named person there, and it can handle the parts of your booking that would otherwise force you through that system, by telephone and in writing on your behalf.

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