Accessibility Statement

Our commitment

We want this site to be usable by veterans and family members navigating with a keyboard, a screen reader, voice control, or any other assistive technology. We're using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA, as our target across vrahelps.org.

We haven't completed a formal third-party accessibility audit or certification. This statement describes what we've actually built, honestly — it isn't a guarantee of full compliance, and we know there's more work to do as the site grows.

What we've built

Specific measures already in place on this site:

• Skip-to-content link at the top of every page, so keyboard users can jump straight past the header to the main content.
• Semantic HTML landmarks — header, navigation, main content, and footer are marked up so assistive technology can identify and move between them.
• Full keyboard navigation — the main menu, the "Resources" dropdown, and every link and button can be operated without a mouse, including closing menus with the Escape key.
• Visible focus outlines on every interactive element, so keyboard users can always see where they are on the page.
• Descriptive alt text on meaningful images, like photos and our logo; purely decorative graphics (like the small ribbon dividers between sections) are hidden from screen readers so they don't add noise.
• Reduced-motion support — if you have "reduce motion" turned on in your operating system, this site shows itself with animations turned off.
• Accessible forms — the Get Help form groups related questions with fieldsets and legends, every field has a proper label, and required fields are marked using the underlying "required" attribute (not color alone), so screen readers announce them correctly.
• High-contrast color choices between text and background throughout the site.

What we're still working on

We haven't had a formal, independent accessibility audit, and we don't have a certification to point to. Accessibility is ongoing work, not something we check off once — as we add new pages, we're checking each one against the same standard, and we welcome being told where we've fallen short.

Let us know if something doesn't work

If you run into anything on this site that's hard to use with a screen reader, keyboard, or any other assistive technology, please tell us. Email [email protected] with what page you were on and what happened, and we'll do our best to fix it.

Changes to this statement

We'll update this page as the site changes and as we make accessibility improvements, and we'll update the date below when we do.