Accessibility

What was actually built

• Structure. Every page uses real landmarks — header, navigation, main, footer — has exactly one h1, does not skip heading levels, and starts with a skip-to-content link. Checked on all 59 built pages, in four conditions, and the last two pages that had content adrift of a landmark were fixed on 17 September 2026.
• Keyboard. Everything you can do with a mouse you can do with a keyboard, including the navigation dropdowns (which open on Enter or Space, close on Escape, and traverse with arrow keys rather than requiring hover), the date picker, the area timelines, and the photo galleries. Two wide tables used to scroll sideways with nothing focusable inside them, which put their right-hand columns out of a keyboard’s reach entirely; they now take focus and show it.
• Focus. The focus indicator is a two-ring marker — a bright ring inside a navy one — chosen because a single yellow ring measured 1.50:1 against the site’s light backgrounds and would have been effectively invisible. The replacement measures at least 4.98:1 on every surface used on this site, and it also renders in Windows forced-colors mode.
• Contrast. Every color pairing on this site is measured, not estimated — and the measuring is what found the one that was wrong. The main button’s label was white on the brand teal at 2.58:1, where the standard asks for 4.5:1, and it was on every page with a button. The label is now the site’s navy at 5.73:1 and the button’s color is unchanged. Contrast is clean across all 57 public pages. Four of the six brand colors still cannot carry text on a light background, so on light pages they are surfaces and never text; on the navy pages they are text, where they measure between 4.98:1 and 9.04:1.
• Motion. Every animation is inside a prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference query. If your system asks for reduced motion, the moving parts stop — the home page’s video hero becomes three still images with no cross-fade, and nothing on the site auto-animates.
• Video. The hero video is muted, carries no audio track at all, and never plays sound. It is decorative and is not the only route to any information.
• Forms. Every field has a real visible label, groups use fieldset and legend, help text and error messages are linked with aria-describedby, errors appear inline next to the field as well as in a summary at the top, and focus moves to that summary when a submission fails. Each error says what is wrong and how to fix it.
• No CAPTCHA anywhere. Spam is handled with a hidden field and a timing check, which cost you nothing and load nothing. A CAPTCHA would have been a barrier for exactly the people this page is about.
• Text over images. No text on this site sits directly on a photograph or on video. Contrast over moving footage cannot be measured, so it cannot be promised — copy sits on a solid panel instead.
• Images. Photographs carry alt text that says what is in them. Where the family has not supplied a photograph yet, the placeholder is labeled and announced as “Placeholder: the DeLisle family” rather than sitting there silently.
• Zoom and reflow. Pages work at 400% zoom and down to a 320px-wide viewport in one column — the same test, measured at 320px across every page — with no horizontal scrolling except in two places where a sideways swipe is the point: the area timelines and the photo filmstrips. Both are keyboard-operable and both read with JavaScript switched off.
• Windows high contrast. Every page was checked with forced colors turned on, and all 59 come through with their roles, names and landmarks intact. The focus ring survives it too, which is why it is drawn with an outline as well as a shadow.
• Without JavaScript. The site works. The contact form submits, the booking module becomes a plain form, the timelines read as ordered lists, and the language switcher is an ordinary link.
• Both languages. Every page declares its language so a screen reader pronounces Spanish as Spanish, and the Spanish pages are a real translation rather than a machine pass.

What it was tested with, and what came back

This site is HTML, CSS and a small amount of JavaScript, and it is built so that the JavaScript is an improvement rather than a requirement. It should work in any current browser. If you are using a browser or an assistive tool more than a few years old and something is broken, that is still worth reporting — we would rather know.

On 17 September 2026 the whole built site was put through axe-core 4.13, the standard open-source accessibility rule engine, driven by Playwright in Chromium 153. Not a sample — all 59 pages, against the WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 rules at levels A and AA plus the engine’s own best-practice set, in four conditions:

• An ordinary desktop window.
• With the browser asking for reduced motion, which is how this site’s own animations are gated.
• At 320 CSS pixels wide, which is the same measurement as 400% zoom and is how the reflow requirement is actually written.
• With Windows high contrast turned on.

The result: no structural violation on any page, in any of the four conditions, and no contrast failure on any of the 57 public pages. Getting there meant fixing three real defects the pass found — an orphaned list in the header on 57 pages, two sideways-scrolling tables a keyboard could not reach, and the button label described above. Separately, Google’s Lighthouse scores this site 100 for accessibility on every one of the eight page templates it audits.

None of that is a private claim. The pass is a command in this site’s own source — `npm run check:a11y` — and it prints every number quoted here. The next section is the more important one: what a test like that cannot see.

What we have not done, and what we know is imperfect

• No independent audit. Nobody outside the team has tested this site. Until that happens, treat “WCAG 2.2 AA” on this page as a target we work to, not a certificate.
• No screen reader has been used on it. This is the honest limit of the section above. That pass was an automated engine in one browser — it has never been through VoiceOver, NVDA, JAWS or TalkBack, and no disabled person has been asked to try booking a week here. A clean automated run and a site that is pleasant to use with a screen reader are not the same achievement, and we have only the first.
• Automated rules catch a minority of what matters. They can tell you an image has no alt text; they cannot tell you the alt text is any good. They can tell you a heading level was skipped; they cannot tell you the headings make sense. They can measure a contrast ratio; they cannot tell you the sentence is confusing. Everything in that category on this site is a human judgement that no one has independently checked.
• The main button’s edge is faint. Having fixed the label, the button’s own color against the page measures 2.50:1, where the standard wants 3:1 for the outline of a control. In practice the button is large, labelled in words and has a strong focus ring, so it is findable — but if you have reduced contrast sensitivity, the shape of it against the page is weaker than it should be. It is on the list, and it is named here rather than left for you to discover.
• One browser engine. Everything above was measured in Chromium. Firefox and Safari render this site with the same HTML and the same CSS, and nothing here uses an engine-specific feature, but they were not part of the measured pass.
• Placeholders instead of photographs. Several images — the family portrait, Stephanie’s and Joe’s portraits, the area photography — have not been supplied yet. They are labeled placeholders. They are announced correctly, but they are not the picture you came for.
• Emphasis is shown by weight, not by italics. The site uses two typefaces that ship no italic, and faked italics are ugly and unreliable, so emphasized words are set in a heavier upright weight. The meaning is intact for a screen reader; visually it is a subtler signal than italics would be.
• The booking checkout is not ours. When you go from our availability module to paying, you land on our property-management provider’s own hosted pages. We do not control that provider’s accessibility, and it was not part of the pass above. If it blocks you, tell us — we can take a booking by phone or email instead, and we want to know so we can raise it with them.
• Third-party maps and embeds. We do not use a third-party map provider on this site; the coastline drawing is our own SVG. If that ever changes, this section changes with it.

If something here blocks you

Tell us and we will fix it. Email expsunshine@gmail.com or call (239) 233-4589.

What helps us most: the address of the page, what you were trying to do, and what happened instead. If you know what you are using — a screen reader, keyboard only, zoom, voice control — that shortens the hunt considerably. None of it is required. “The booking form won’t let me pick a date” is a perfectly good report.

We answer accessibility reports within 48 hours, which is the same promise the contact page makes for any other message, because it is the same two people answering. If a fix is going to take longer than that, the reply will say so and tell you what we can do in the meantime.

And in the meantime, there is always a person. Anything you can do on this site you can do by calling or emailing us instead: ask about dates, hold a week, ask Stephanie about an area or a property. You will never be told to go and use the form.

Next review

This page was last reviewed on 17 September 2026, and the test behind it is a command rather than an occasion — it runs against the whole site whenever the site changes, which is what keeps the section above from going quietly stale.

The next full review is due by September 2027, and sooner than that if the booking module, the forms or the color palette change. Stephanie and Joe are responsible for it, the same as everything else here; there is no department. If the date above is more than a year behind today, this page has slipped and you are entitled to say so.