what can be promised, and what can only be asked
Accessibility
Two lists that behave differently: things about this website, which can be promised, and things about a boat in a fjord, which can only be asked about and reported back.
What can be promised, because it is ours
- Without a mouse
- Every control reachable and operable from the keyboard on all four grounds this site uses, with the focus ring visible on each
- Heading order
- One h1 to a page, and everything below descending one level at a time with nothing skipped
- Contrast
- Read off the real backdrop under every line, not off an assumed white, since three of the four grounds here are a warm paper
- Alternative text
- Composed by looking at the image itself. Where an image is there for decoration alone the attribute stays empty, since a reader hearing the same caption twice is worse served than one hearing nothing
- The exposure marks
- A shape, an angle of tilt, never a color, so a grayscale print and every form of color blindness lose nothing
- Arrival
- A section slides ten pixels as it settles, and at no point is it made transparent, so an animation that fails cannot take a page down with it. A preference for less motion switches it off
- Zoom
- Four hundred percent reflows with no sideways scrollbar
- Fields
- Every input has a genuine label, every error is spelled out in words next to the field it belongs to, and no meaning anywhere rests on color by itself
What can only be asked, because it is somebody else's
⚠️ This is the part that matters more here than on most travel sites, and it is worth being plain about why.
Several of these trips involve small boats, ice, tenders, gangways, and vehicles reached across uneven ground. Whether any of that works for you depends on a specific hull, a specific pier and a specific morning's conditions, and no page written in advance can answer it honestly.
So it gets asked rather than claimed. Tell us what you need and the question goes to the operator in plain terms: how many steps to the cabin deck, how wide the door, whether a chair fits the tender, whether there is a lift, whether a transfer at sea is required and what happens if you cannot make it. Whatever comes back is repeated to you word for word, refusals included, and a refusal is not treated as a failure of the question.
Where this site falls short
- The five rows
- Every trip page carries a table that has to be pushed left and right on a narrow phone. You can read it; you will not enjoy reading it
- The catalog
- Nineteen entries is a long scroll on a telephone and there is no filter to shorten it
- Screen readers
- Tested with a single reader against a single browser. That is not the whole field, and claiming otherwise on an accessibility page would be its own kind of failure
- Language
- English, and only English. It is plainer English than this trade normally writes, which is the most that can be claimed
Reporting something
A line to afterwards@travelmonte.com: which page, what you were reading it with, and what failed. Back comes either a fix with a day attached to it, or a straight statement that no fix is coming. What never comes back is nothing at all.