A guide for
every South Dakotan.

Our commitment

Sensible South Dakota is committed to ensuring that this voter guide is usable by everyone, regardless of ability, device, or connection speed. That includes voters using screen readers, voice control, keyboard-only navigation, zoom, high-contrast modes, and reduced-motion settings.

Standards

We target Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA, with aspirations toward AAA on color contrast, readable text, and focus visibility. We also follow:

• Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (federal benchmark).
• The WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices for interactive components.
• Native HTML semantics first; ARIA only where native elements fall short.

What we’ve built in

• Keyboard navigation— every link, button, menu, form field, and accordion is reachable and operable by keyboard alone. A “Skip to main content” link is the first focusable element on every page.
• Visible focus indicators — a gold outline appears on any focused element so keyboard users always know where they are.
• Color contrast— all body text meets 4.5:1, large text meets 3:1, non-text UI meets 3:1. We test with WebAIM’s contrast checker.
• Screen-reader labels — icons have aria-hidden, buttons have accessible names, form fields have programmatic labels, landmarks use <header> <nav> <main> <footer>.
• Reduced motion — if your OS requests reduced motion, the hero and footer background videos are hidden automatically.
• Zoom — text scales to 200% without horizontal scrolling on the primary content column.
• No keyboard traps — modals, drawers, and menus return focus to the trigger when closed.
• Plain language — we write at roughly an eighth-grade reading level; political prose often drifts higher.

Known limitations

We are honest about what we haven’t solved yet:

• Some candidate photos are still placeholder art; once real photos are added, each will receive descriptive alt text (name, title, setting).
• Our district map (coming in v2) will require a parallel list view — we’re not shipping the map alone.
• Historic vote records currently embedded as tables may benefit from a downloadable CSV for screen-reader users. On our roadmap.

Testing

We test with: NVDA + Firefox (Windows), VoiceOver + Safari (macOS and iOS), TalkBack + Chrome (Android), keyboard-only in all major browsers, and automated tools (axe, Lighthouse). Manual review happens at every major release.

Report a problem

If a page, link, form, or feature is not accessible to you, please tell us. We treat accessibility bugs as P1:

• Use the contact form to describe the issue.
• Response target: 3 business days for acknowledgement, 14 days for resolution or a concrete ETA.

Third-party content

Outbound links (e.g. the Secretary of State’s voter tools) are governed by those sites’ accessibility statements. We choose outbound destinations with accessibility in mind but cannot control their implementations.