Accessibility Adjustments Help

Toggle High Contrast

This button will darken the page's background color to black while making all text white. This high contrast will make it easier to read the website's content.

Toggle Page Zoom

This button will increase the size of all elements on the page.

Toggle Focus State

This button adds a visible focus state to all interactive elements when using the keyboard. This allows the user to know exactly where they are on a site while tabbing through with a keyboard. Note: this will only affect sites that do not currently have visible focus states.

Toggle Link Highlights

This button will add an outline to all links and buttons on a page that a user can interact with.

Accessibility Checker Help

Check Images

This triggers a check of all images on a page for either an 'alt', 'title', or an 'aria-label' attribute. Images that are purely decorative or do not include any information to convey to the user do not need alt text. In these cases, the alt attribute should still be present but should be left empty. Our checker will still flag empty alts as an error just in case.

Check Color Contrast

This triggers a check of all text to ensure that it's color has a high enough contrast against the color of the background it is on. In some cases our checker will flag contrast errors for text that is on top of an image or when either the text or the background element has a position of 'absolute'. In these cases it is up to the site administrator's discretion to determine if the text is legible.

Check Links & Buttons

This triggers a check of all the page's links and buttons. Links and buttons without text or an aria-label describing what the link or button accomplishes will fail. Without text (including hidden screen reader only text) or an aria-label, assistive technology will not be able to determine the purpose of the link/button.

Check For Duplicate IDs

This triggers a search for all IDs on a page. Duplicate IDs will be flagged as an error. Duplicate ID errors are known to cause problems for assistive technologies when they are trying to interact with content. SVGs tend to be a major source of this failure. It's beneficial to remove all IDs from SVGs before placing them on a page.

Social Security Advisory Board

About The Social Security Advisory Board

Founded in 1994 as a bipartisan agency to provide advice to the President and Congress on issues of old-age, survivors, as well as Disability Insurance and the Supplemental Security Income programs. The Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB) was getting hundreds of calls and even walk-ins to their office by people looking for the Social Security Administration (SSA), creating confusion for everybody. That’s when Ignition72 was brought in. The new website needed to be clean and professional, not only in assisting policy researchers, but also in providing clarity to everybody that SSAB is not the Social Security Administration!

Client:Social Security Advisory Board
Service:Accessibility, Branding and Identity, Development, Digital Strategy, UX/UI Design, Video & Animation
Industry:Government
Visit:ssab.gov

Social Security is not just another government spending program. It is a promise from generation to generation.

Hank Johnson

Learning + Planning

The Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB) was in need of a new website in short order. A big conference was approaching, and they had no way to post all the conference materials on their old site. At the same time, they were looking for a new hosting partner, who won the contract and asked us to manage the website project.

By the time the contract was signed, they had 4 weeks to the conference date. Ignition72 put together a custom-designed temporary WordPress website in two weeks; then began to work on planning a new website from scratch, to be built after the conference. The challenge was understanding their audiences and goals and brand ethos quickly enough to put together a short-term website for them, with an eye toward rebranding SSAB for a new, robust, modern website.

01/01

Design + Development

Ignition72 conducted user research and testing, and spent time with SSAB staff as well as SSA staff to understand the role of SSAB and how they wanted to be seen to the public. Their audience group ranged from members of Congress to researchers of Social Security policies to the general public.

The final site was a clean, professional site featuring hundreds of publications, data spreadsheets, announcements, press releases, and conference materials. Some content is pulled into site pages dynamically, while some documents are manually selected for display. The vast audience groups that use the SSAB now get access to hundreds of documents in a clear, concise way.