Sixteen trips, eight pairs, one comparison table that has to hold both halves of a pair in view at once. That table is the hardest part of this site to get right for a screen reader, and it is also the whole point of the site, so it gets the most attention here.
The Charlotte office writes and checks these pages itself. Nobody has certified them. What follows is what we have actually tested with a keyboard, with VoiceOver on macOS and iOS, with NVDA on Windows, and with the page zoomed to 400 percent in a narrow window.
What is already in place
- Keyboard
- Every link, field, button and expander works from the keyboard alone. Tab moves forward, Shift and Tab move back, Enter and Space activate. Nothing on this site opens a trap you cannot Tab out of, and there is a skip link as the first stop on every page.
- Heading order
- Each page has a single h1, and everything under it steps down one level at a time without gaps, so jumping by heading in a screen reader gives you the real shape of the page rather than a decorative one.
- Contrast
- Text contrast is measured against the color actually painted behind it, not against an assumed white, including text set over photographs, where a solid panel sits between the picture and the words. Body text clears 4.5 to 1 and large headings clear 3 to 1.
- Alternative text
- Photographs of a valley or a coast carry a short written description of what is in the frame. Images that repeat text already next to them are marked as decorative so a screen reader skips them instead of reading the same line twice.
- Presence marks in the table
- Each mark in the comparison table is a filled square or an open square, and every single one has a word printed beside it, so the mark is never the only carrier of meaning. Filled reads "included", open reads "not included". Nothing there is conveyed by color alone, and nothing is conveyed by shape alone.
- The comparison table itself
- It is a real HTML table with a caption, row headers naming each item and column headers naming each of the two trips in the pair. A screen reader announces the row and the column before the value, so you hear which trip you are being told about without counting cells.
- Arrival and motion
- Content that appears as you scroll moves into position; it does not fade in from nothing. If your system asks for reduced motion, nothing slides at all and the block is simply sitting where it belongs. No carousel starts itself, nothing flashes, and nothing scrolls sideways on its own.
- Zoom and fields
- At 400 percent zoom in a 1280 pixel window the text reflows into a single column and no content is lost. Form fields have visible labels that stay visible while you type, errors are described in words next to the field rather than by a red outline, and no field times out while you are filling it.
The parts still not right
- The comparison table on a phone
- It is eight rows wide by two trips and there is no honest way to fit that on a 375 pixel screen. It scrolls sideways inside its own box. The box is reachable by keyboard and announced, but reading it on a phone is genuinely awkward, and we would rather say so than pretend.
- Older written figures
- Written figures sent before this year went out as PDF files that were not tagged for structure. Ask and a plain text or HTML version of any figure comes back the same working day.
- Long pair pages
- Some pair pages run past 2,000 words with no in-page contents list, so a screen reader user has to travel through the headings to find the section they want. A contents block at the top of those pages is the next thing on the list.
- Photograph descriptions
- The alternative text on trip photographs says what is in the frame but is often brief. Where a picture is doing real work, telling you how steep a path is or how far apart two villages sit, the description ought to be longer and is not yet.
Reporting something that blocked you
Write to casebook@thebriarreview.com or call (704) 362-5187 and say what you were trying to do, what page you were on, and what happened instead. It helps to name the browser and the assistive software, but if you do not know them, describe what you saw and we will work it out.
A message is opened before the working day ends. If the fix is small it usually goes out within a few days. If it is structural, like the contents blocks on long pages, you get a written answer saying what we intend to do and roughly when, rather than silence.
If the barrier stopped you from sending a booking request, do not spend another minute on the form. Call or write in whatever way is easiest for you, name the two trips you are weighing, and an agent takes the request down by hand. This office takes booking requests and arranges the reservation with the operating company on your behalf. It takes no payment, holds no card, and there is no checkout anywhere on this site, so nothing is lost by handing the request over in a sentence instead of a form.
Any difference, in writing, on request
The whole site pairs one place with another and refuses to pick between them. That refusal only means something if you can actually get at the differences, so here is the standing offer: name two trips and ask what separates them on any point you care about, and an agent writes it out in plain sentences and sends it to you. Walking distances in miles, temperatures in Fahrenheit, how many nights sit in each place, how much of each day is arranged and how much is yours, what the ground underfoot is like, how far the nearest town is, what the transfer from the airport involves.
That written answer takes two to four working days and comes as plain text in the body of an email unless you ask for something else. It is not a recommendation and it will not tell you which of the two to take. It states the facts side by side and leaves the choice with you, which is the same thing the pages do, only in a form you can read at your own pace with your own software.
The Briar Review is not a publication and does not publish assessments of anywhere. It is an agency in Charlotte, NC, that arranges trips and takes its commission from the operating company after you travel.