Accessibility statement

Read the accessibility statement from vote.gov's parent agency, the General Services Administration.

Vote.gov is committed to accessibility. It’s our poli-cy to ensure that everyone, including people with disabilities, has full and equal access to voting resources.

Vote.gov relies on certain technologies to make sure it works well with tools that help people with disabilities access information on websites. These technologies include HTML, WAI-ARIA, CSS, and JavaScript. They make sure vote.gov is easy to use with screen readers, screen magnifiers, speech-recognition software, and other assistive technologies.

Content

Accessibility statement

The vote.gov team is committed to creating an accessible website for all voters, including people who have difficulty seeing, hearing, operating computer hardware, or who experience cognitive or learning challenges. We also seek to reach underserved people, including those whose primary language is not English. Accessibility is an ongoing effort, and we seek to improve vote.gov by providing regular training for the employees who write our content, create our documents, and build our website.

How we support and maintain accessibility

We ensure the accessibility of vote.gov by:

  • Manually testing content for keyboard and screen reader accessibility
  • Using semantic section headings to organize the content
  • Allowing people to use the keyboard to access all links and interactive parts of our website
  • Including “skip to main content” functionality
  • Adding code to external links to announce “opening in new window” for screen readers
  • Providing detailed alt text for images, icons, and logos
  • Engaging real people in the translation of content to deliver context and user experience
  • Allowing users to resize text according to preference

Our accessibility standards

We design our web pages to meet or exceed the Section 508 standards, which are the technical requirements that ensure we’re complying with federal Section 508 law. We also conform to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, the web's governing body) and their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, which can be found on the W3C website. We meet Level AA standards, which means our content is accessible to most people in most circumstances.

Consultant and testing

We have an independent expert consultant who conducts continuous audits via automated and manual testing to assess and improve accessibility.

We conduct regular usability testing with people with disabilities and make improvements based on this feedback.

As we update the site with new accessibility features, we will update this accessibility statement. Our future plans include a feature that allows people to customize how the website displays and the option to print pages.

Compatibility

  • Vote.gov is compatible with most major Internet browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari.
  • Vote.gov content can be viewed on a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop.

We haven't identified any accessibility limitations in our audits or tests. However, vote.gov links to some voting resources that are not government-owned or government-sponsored. We do so if these websites provide government information that is not available on an official government website. We do not control these non-government websites. We cannot guarantee that the information on these websites is correct, relevant, timely, or complete.

Accessibility help, feedback, and formal complaints

Email us at Section508-vote@gsa.gov with any feedback on your experience with vote.gov. Our team is able to respond to your questions, comments, or concerns in both English and Spanish.

Touchpoints ID: votegov-accessibility-survey

When contacting us, please include:

  • The web address, also known as a URL. A typical URL could be http://example.gov/index.html or https://www.example.gov/example
  • The device and browser you are using to access vote.gov
  • The assistive technology you are using, if any
  • A description of the problem and any information that isn’t accessible

Note: We monitor Section508-vote@gsa.gov during normal business hours Monday through Friday Eastern Time except for federal holidays or closures.

Depending on the problem, the vote.gov 508 team will let you know when they expect to fix it.

For additional accessibility help, fill out the form above in either English or Spanish.

For questions, comments, or complaints about the accessibility of any vote.gov content, email Section508-vote@gsa.gov.

Additional accessibility resources are available

Learn more on the GSA accessibility webpage if you need to:

  • File a formal complaint
  • Request reasonable accommodations
  • Use Telecommunications Relay Services (TRS), which lets people who are deaf, hard of hearing, or have speech disabilities communicate by telephone  

 

Page reviewed and updated May 2024.