Accessibility

Last updated: August 2026

The building: please read this before booking

The Cornell Hotel de France was built in 1910 and is registered on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Lower Nob Hill Apartment Hotel District.

An evaluation survey carried out by a Certified Access Specialist determined that it is not technically feasible to remove the front steps, or to provide an accessible alternative route for people who use wheelchairs.

We cannot accommodate guests who use wheelchairs. We are sorry about it, and we put it here, plainly and near the top, because the worst version of this is discovering it on the doorstep after a long journey.

If you have mobility needs short of that — stairs you can take slowly, a room on a particular floor, a bed at a particular height — please call us on (415) 421-3154 before booking. The concierge desk is staffed 24 hours, knows this building well, and will tell you honestly whether it will work for you.

Things worth knowing:

• There are steps at the front entrance.
• The building is from 1910; hallways and doorways are narrower than a modern hotel’s.
• There is no air conditioning — rooms have heating and windows.
• Every room has its own bathroom.

Service animals

Service animals are always welcome throughout the hotel and are exempt from the pet fee, in accordance with ADA guidelines.

This website

The site is built to WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

• Colour contrast is measured, not guessed. Every text and background pair has been checked against the 4.5:1 ratio the standard requires for body text. Our own brand gold failed that test on both the navy and the cream, so the site uses two adjusted golds — one for dark backgrounds, one for light — and the ratios are recorded in the stylesheet.
• Everything works from the keyboard, with a skip link and a visible focus indicator on every control.
• The site works with JavaScript disabled. Booking, the menu and every form are ordinary HTML.
• Every page has one <h1> and a heading structure you can navigate by.
• Images have alt text; decorative images are marked so screen readers skip them.
• Targets are at least 48px.
• Motion respects your system setting.
• There is no CAPTCHA — image and audio puzzles are themselves a barrier.

We have deliberately not installed an accessibility overlay widget. Overlays interfere with the assistive technology people already use and configure, and they do not fix the underlying markup.

Booking

The booking engine is SynXis, run by Sabre, and is a third-party system we do not control. If you meet a barrier there, call us and we will take the booking directly.

Tell us where we have got it wrong

If something here does not work for you — including anything this page claims is fine — we want to know.

Email cornell@cornellhotel.com Call (415) 421-3154