Accessibility

This site runs on Chorus, a modern publishing platform by Vox Media. If you have any trouble browsing the site or accessing the content, please email us at accessibility@voxmedia.com.

Our commitment

We’re committed to building a robust, inclusive, and accessible platform for all audiences. We strive to meet level AA standards from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.

Right now, our sites meet the majority of the standards and are substantially compliant with the AA standards. We’re working to bridge any remaining gaps by updating the platform and partnering with content creators to ensure stories are accessible. There’s more for us to do, and we’ll continue updating this page as we make improvements.

Site features

While each Chorus site looks visually different, our goal is to give everyone the same levels of access and ease of use.

• Each page on this site has semantic regions for the navigation, main content, and footer so you can move around quickly. There’s also a “Skip to main content” link on every page.
• Stories begin with an h1 heading, and we’ve done our best to ensure headings follow a logical order.
• You should be able to zoom up to 300% without any issues.
• Design elements have been updated to improve color contrast and navigability.
• We support captions in our video players, and we’ve improved how videos work with screen readers.
• Advertisements should have accessible labels. We don’t hide content if you use an ad blocker. We also encourage advertising partners to include captions for sponsored videos.
• Newsletter subscription forms and social sharing menus are more useable. If you share a story that has images with alt text, we send the text alternatives over to Facebook and Twitter as well.

How we test the platform

Along with testing in modern browsers, we use VoiceOver in Chrome and Safari to review our sites.

In the near future, we will test any changes or improvements with NVDA and VoiceOver. We’re also developing a suite of automated accessibility tests to help us flag issues with our sites.

Future improvements

Here are a few things we’re hoping to update in the coming months:

• Site navigation
• Contact forms
• Some elements are not in the order you’d expect when using a keyboard to navigate
• Embeds and third-party content need accessible names
• Text spacing could be improved for legibility

Along with these improvements, we’re continuing to work with content creators to ensure that new stories are accessible to people with disabilities. This includes adding:

• Alternative text for content images
• Captions for videos
• Transcripts for podcasts and audio files
• Text descriptions for ads
• Options to reduce motion in ads and interactive stories

We’ll continue updating this page as we improve the platform. You can also follow along with our progress on the Vox Product blog.

Contact us

If you have any feedback or questions about accessibility, we’d love to hear from you: accessibility@voxmedia.com. Please include details about the site you’re trying to access and the kind of assistive technology you’re using (e.g., VoiceOver on iOS).

Published: December 11, 2019
Last updated: December 11, 2019