Accessibility Statement
Court records and legal reference material should be findable by everyone, including people using assistive technology. Here is where we stand and how to tell us when we fall short.
Our Standard: WCAG 2.1 AA
Legal Journal targets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at level AA across the site. That is the standard most government sites are held to, and since our whole purpose is pointing people to those official sources, we hold ourselves to the same bar. The commitment covers every page linked from the Legal Journal homepage, from long-form guides to the state-by-state directories.
How We Test
Accessibility on this site starts in the design system rather than being patched on afterward. When the site's color palette was built, every foreground and background pairing was contrast-verified against the WCAG AA threshold of 4.5:1, so readable contrast is a property of the design tokens themselves rather than something checked page by page.
Beyond contrast, the site is built to be keyboard navigable: a skip-to-content link is the first thing keyboard focus reaches on every page, navigation and breadcrumbs are standard links, and pages use semantic HTML with one heading per level in a logical order, labeled landmarks, and text that scales with your browser settings. Because the site is built from a small set of shared templates, checking a template improves every page that uses it.
Known Limitations
The biggest limitation is inherent to what we do: our guides link out to official court portals, government sites, and library catalogs, and we have no control over the accessibility of those destinations. Some official records systems, and especially older PDF documents hosted on them, do not meet WCAG AA. Where a portal is known to be difficult, our guides describe alternatives when the court offers them, such as requesting records from the clerk directly.
On our own pages, we treat any barrier as a bug. If a page resists keyboard use, reads poorly in a screen reader, or has contrast problems, that is a defect we want reported.
Report a Barrier
If you hit an accessibility barrier anywhere on Legal Journal, please tell us through the contact page. The most useful reports include the page URL, what you were trying to do, and the browser and assistive technology you were using (for example, NVDA with Firefox, or VoiceOver in Safari). Accessibility reports are handled with the same priority as corrections: they go to the editorial team and get fixed on the affected template, which fixes every page built from it.