Accessibility
A lot of the people who hire an inspector of elections are retired, often reading on a tablet, and often at the end of a long board meeting. This site is built for that, and this page says exactly what was done so you can hold us to it.
What we aimed at
We built to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.2, level AA, and in several places deliberately past it. We are not going to tell you the site is certified or compliant, because conformance is something an independent auditor determines and nobody has audited this site. What follows is what was built and measured.
What that meant in practice
Body text starts at 18 pixels
Most sites start at 16. Ours starts at 18 with generous line spacing, and the whole layout still works at 200 percent zoom without anything overlapping or scrolling sideways.
Strong contrast, measured rather than eyeballed
Body text measures 16.85 to 1 against the page. The guidelines ask for 4.5 to 1 on body text, so there is real headroom. Links are the same near-black as the text, so every link is underlined rather than told apart by colour alone.
Faint rules never bound anything you have to use
The hairline colour separating sections is deliberately faint, at 1.43 to 1, so it is used for decoration only. Every text field and dropdown uses a stronger border, at 4.07 to 1, which clears the 3 to 1 the guidelines ask for on interactive boundaries.
Large targets
Buttons, menu items and links that stand on their own line are at least 44 pixels tall, and form fields are 48, against a guideline minimum of 24. Links inside a sentence are the size of the text around them, which the guidelines allow. Fields use 18 pixel text, which also stops iPhones zooming the page when you tap into one.
A focus outline you can actually see
Tabbing through the site draws a 3 pixel outline with a gap around it: near-black on light backgrounds and white on the black sections and the footer, so it stands out on both. It was measured against every background colour used here rather than assumed.
Ordinary browser controls
The date pickers, dropdowns, checkboxes and the expanding questions are the browser’s own rather than rebuilt in JavaScript. They behave the way your screen reader and your keyboard already expect, and they keep working if a script fails to load.
The site works without JavaScript
Every page reads and every link works with scripts switched off, and the proposal form submits normally. The two calculators are the only things that need JavaScript, and the information they compute is also printed on the page as plain text.
Nothing moves unless you ask it to
No animation on scroll, no carousels, no automatic slideshows, no video that plays by itself. Anything that transitions respects the reduce-motion setting in your operating system.
No pop-ups and no chat widget
Nothing appears over what you are reading, and nothing interrupts you.
What we have not done
- This site has not had an independent accessibility audit. Everything above was measured during the build by the people who built it, which is not the same thing.
- It has not been tested end to end with JAWS, NVDA or VoiceOver by somebody who uses one daily. It is built on standard HTML elements precisely so that it should behave, and should is doing real work in that sentence.
- The printable output from the timeline tool has had less attention than the pages themselves.
If something here does not work for you
Tell us and we will fix it. Say which page, what happened, and what you were using to read it. We would rather hear about a problem than have you give up on the page, and an accessibility report goes to the front of the queue.
Email info@hoaballotservices.org. If the website is in your way and you need to get hold of us about an election, phoning always works and nobody will ask you to fill anything in first.
Last reviewed September 25, 2026.