Accessibility Statement

Mandate Labs, Inc. (“Mandate,” “we,” “us”) wants everyone who visits our website or uses the Mandate platform to have a full and equal experience, including people who use screen readers, keyboard-only navigation, voice control, screen magnification, or other assistive technology.

Our commitment

Our mission is to make policy accessible to everyone. Legislative information is public information, and the tools people use to follow it and act on it should be usable by everyone. We treat accessibility as an ongoing part of how we design and build, not a one-time checklist. We consider accessibility when we add new pages and features, and we fix barriers we find or that are reported to us.

Standard we follow

We use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, Level AA as our standard. WCAG is published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is the most widely adopted benchmark for digital accessibility, including under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.

Conformance status

This website and the Mandate platform are partially conformant with WCAG 2.2 Level AA. “Partially conformant” means that some parts of the content do not yet fully conform to the standard. We use this term deliberately: we have not yet completed a full third-party conformance audit, and we would rather describe our status honestly than overstate it. We address known issues as we find them and welcome reports of anything we have missed.

Measures we take

In how the site is built

• Semantic HTML structure with landmark regions and a logical heading hierarchy
• Visible keyboard focus states on links, buttons, menus, and form controls
• Keyboard operability for navigation, sign-in, and core workflows
• Alternative text on informational images; decorative images hidden from assistive technology
• Color contrast designed for readability, and status shown with text, not color alone
• Support for the reduced motion setting: animations are reduced or removed for people who ask their device to limit motion
• A skip to content link on marketing pages
• Layouts that remain usable when zoomed to 200% or viewed on small screens
• Descriptive page titles, form labels, and link text

In how we work

• Accessibility is part of our review checklist for new pages and features
• Reported barriers are triaged like functional bugs, not deferred as enhancements
• This statement is reviewed and updated as the site and platform change

Compatibility

Mandate is designed to work with current versions of major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge) on desktop and mobile, and with common assistive technologies, including screen readers such as VoiceOver, NVDA, and JAWS. Our public pages are rendered on the server, so their core content is delivered as HTML. The signed-in Mandate workspace requires JavaScript.

Technical specifications

Accessibility of Mandate relies on the following technologies working with your browser and any assistive technologies or plugins installed on your computer: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and WAI-ARIA.

Known limitations

Despite our efforts, some parts of Mandate may not yet be fully accessible. Known areas include:

• Government source documents. Bill text, PDFs, and other documents we link to come from legislatures and agencies, and may not meet accessibility standards. If you need one in another format, contact us and we will help.
• Third-party services. Checkout and billing management are hosted by our payment processor. Where a third-party page presents a barrier, contact us and we will help you complete the same task another way.
• Maps and charts. Some information, such as state coverage maps, is shown visually. We aim to provide the same information as text, and will provide it on request.
• Newer features. Mandate is growing quickly, and some recently released features may not yet have had a full accessibility review.

If you run into a barrier not listed here, please tell us (see Feedback and contact below).

How we assess Mandate

We assess accessibility through internal self-evaluation, using a combination of automated testing tools and manual checks, including keyboard-only navigation and screen reader spot checks on key pages and user flows. We will update this statement if we complete a formal external audit.

Public-sector customers

Many organizations we serve, including government agencies and public institutions, have their own accessibility obligations, including Section 508. If your organization needs accessibility documentation for procurement or compliance review, contact us at hello@mandatepolicy.com and we will work with you.

Feedback and contact

Found a barrier? Email hello@mandatepolicy.com with the page address and a short description of the problem. We aim to respond within 2 business days. When you write to us, it helps to include the URL of the page, what you were trying to do, and the browser and assistive technology you were using, but none of that is required.

If any content on Mandate is inaccessible to you, we will provide it in an alternative format on request.

Mandate Labs, Inc., Washington, DC