Accessibility

If something here does not work for you, we will read it to you

Call the committee or send an email and say what you were trying to find. We will read it to you over the phone, send it in an email you can enlarge, or put it in the mail in large print — whatever works. You do not have to explain why, and you do not have to use the word accessibility.

If you are asking about a deadline, an early voting site, or anything else that is time-sensitive before an election, say so and we will treat it that way.

Accessible voting is handled by the Supervisor of Elections

This is a political party's website. Voting does not happen here, and this committee cannot change anything about a polling place or a ballot.

Florida law requires accessible voting equipment at every polling place, and a voter who needs help marking a ballot may bring someone with them or ask for assistance from poll workers. The office that arranges all of it is the Polk County Supervisor of Elections, at (863) 534-5888 or polkelections.gov. If you would rather start with us, call and we will put you in touch.

What we are building to

The standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA — the accessibility guideline most public bodies in the United States are held to. This site is partially conformant against it: it meets the standard on everything we have tested, and there are places named below where we know it does not.

That word partially is doing real work. We would rather tell you where the gaps are than claim a clean bill of health you would discover was wrong.

What is already true of every page

Each of these was checked against the live site on the date at the top of this page, not assumed.

• The whole site can be operated with a keyboard alone, and a skip to content link lets you jump past the menu.
• Text and background colors are measured against the contrast standard, and the pages we test currently pass it with room to spare.
• Buttons, links and form fields are at least 44 pixels tall — larger than the guideline asks for, because most of this site's visitors are on a phone.
• Every form field has a real label, and when something is wrong the error is attached to the field it belongs to, so a screen reader announces it instead of leaving you to hunt.
• Headings run in order and the page has proper landmarks, so a screen reader can move around a page rather than read it top to bottom.
• Photographs carry text descriptions.
• If your device is set to reduce motion, the animations here stop.
• You can enlarge the text in your browser without the layout coming apart.
• There are no pop-ups, no cookie banner, no video that plays on its own, and no time limit on filling in a form.

Where we know we fall short

• The Spanish pages are translated section by section, and anything not yet translated appears in English on a page marked as Spanish. A screen reader set to Spanish will read that English aloud as though it were Spanish. The English version of any page is at the same address without the /es.
• Several things this site links to are run by other people — the donation page, the poll watcher sign-up, candidates' own campaign websites, the county's election pages, maps and social media. We do not control those and cannot promise they are accessible. Tell us if one of them blocks you and we will get you what you were after.
• Descriptions of community events are written by the organizations that submit them. Every one is read before it is published, but the wording is theirs.
• There has been no formal audit by an outside accessibility firm. Our testing is automated checks over the site plus people working through it by hand, which finds a great deal and does not find everything.

How this is tested

Automated checks run across the site's pages for color contrast, missing image descriptions, unlabeled form fields, heading order and target size, and pages are then walked through with a keyboard. The date at the top of this page is the last time that was done and this page re-read against what it found.

Tell us when we get it wrong

If something on this site does not work with your screen reader, your keyboard, your magnifier or your phone, we want to hear about it — which page it was, and what you were using to read it. Reports from readers are how most of these things get found, and it is the fastest way any of them get fixed.