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DESCRIBING: A simple digital illustration representing web accessibility attributes. SYNOPSIS: The top of the illustration shows a simplified web browser window as indicated by the typical browser interface with three circular buttons (available in red, yellow, and blue) on the top left corner. Those buttons represent minimize, maximize, and close functions. Below this browser interface, there are three speech balloons, each in a different color and containing different HTML attributes. The first speech balloon, in orange, contains the text role='button', which is used to assign an explicit role to an element. The second speech balloon is green and includes aria-label='...', a way of adding accessible labels to elements. The third speech balloon is in teal and shows tabindex='3', which defines the tab order of the element for keyboard navigation. The positioning of these speech balloons, centered within the browser window framework, underlines their importance in web accessibility.

DESCRIBING: A simple digital illustration representing web accessibility attributes.
SYNOPSIS: The top of the illustration shows a simplified web browser window as indicated by the typical browser interface with three circular buttons (available in red, yellow, and blue) on the top left corner. Those buttons represent minimize, maximize, and close functions. Below this browser interface, there are three speech balloons, each in a different color and containing different HTML attributes. The first speech balloon, in orange, contains the text "role='button'," which is used to assign an explicit role to an element. The second speech balloon is green and includes "aria-label='...'," a way of adding accessible labels to elements. The third speech balloon is in teal and shows "tabindex='3'," which defines the tab order of the element for keyboard navigation. The positioning of these speech balloons, centered within the browser window framework, underlines their importance in web accessibility.

Website & Mobile App Accessibility, Review & Remediation

Web laws and standards have been steadily increasing in sophistication in recent years, requiring deeper and deeper levels of accessibility, for all types of audiences.

The Access Hound team can help you understand the current state of accessibility of your website or mobile app and also help you to make it more accessible to all users. We have been building websites since 1996 and mobile apps since 2008, and we specialize in making or remeditating websites and mobile apps that meet the highest WCAG standards possible for a project. Websites and mobile apps that we support get tested by real people with representative skills on real devices in real situations, ensuring that these interfaces work and do what they are designed to do.

For a status report, the Access Hound team can do a full review of your website or mobile app. We will document any variances from federal law and industry standards as well as provide assistance in reaching and exceeding legal compliance.

After we determine the current status of your site, we have engineers on staff that can make the required updates for your website or train your engineers on how to write more accessible code.

Let's build something great together
Hawaii Association of the Blind members Hilarion and Lance Kamaka stand silently and with reverance near the name-filled marble walls inside the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial. This Pearl Harbor National Memorial site commemorates the nearly 1,200 people who died on that ship when it was attacked and sunk on Dec. 7, 1941 in the Oahu harbor. Hilarion is standing behind his older brother and resting his right hand on Lance's right shoulder. Lance is holding a white cane, and the men also have visible hearing aids, indicating they are both hard of hearing and blind. The brothers recalled visiting the National Park Service site decades ago, as children, but had felt that the site at the time was inaccessible to them and not worthy of a return visit. That changed when they were invited back in April 2023 as part of a research project being conducted by The UniDescription Project. On this return visit, Lance said, the site's accessibility had improved greatly, and this improved access allowed him and his brother to properly pay their respects to the people who had perished and also to learn more about the history of the place and its role in World War II. For our part, the UniD research team has collaborated with the Hawaii Association of the Blind and the Pearl Harbor staff, including Chief of Interpretation David Kilton, to audio describe the site's official print brochures for Pearl Harbor National Memorial, the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial, the U.S.S. Oklahoma Memorial, and the U.S.S. Utah Memorial. Descriptions of those national park sites (and more than 200 others) are available now in the free UniD app (for iOS or Android).

Hawaii Association of the Blind members Hilarion and Lance Kamaka stand silently and with reverance, listening to Audio Description near the name-filled marble walls inside the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial. This Pearl Harbor National Memorial site commemorates the nearly 1,200 people who died on that ship when it was attacked and sunk on Dec. 7, 1941 in the Oahu harbor.

Human-centered design

Access Hound team members have refined and refocused media experiences at more than 200 public attractions throughout the country, including accessibility evaluations and remediation projects, leading to more-accessible mobile apps, websites, and GenAI webtools.

Our team has improved user-experience research standards and drove design progress in a wide variety of innovative ways, including advancing inclusion, as shown in dozens of published academic papers documenting impacts directly related to integrity, accountability, and thought leadership. Clients have included commercial entities as well as national and state parks, libraries, universities, botanical gardens, performing arts centers, wildlife refuges, aquariums and zoos.

Let everyone be a part of what you're building
Susan Glass, an American Council of the Blind member, is raising her arms above her head and stretching out her hands in response to the audio prompt in The Presidio: Goldsworthy Walk project on her UniD app. She is holding her smartphone in one of her raised hands and closing her eyes to listen to the audio. She has a paper medical mask on – as a pandemic preventative in September of 2021. The mask has been pulled down under her chin for this moment. The audio prompt is asking her to imagine how tall the Spire artwork is, not shown here, by imaging her size, in the thick forest setting, and projecting herself in size up into the air several times. Glass is accompanied by her yellow lab guide dog, Omni, who is equipped with a handled harness. The dog – who actually has latte-foam-colored cream fur rather than yellow – is standing in front of Glass, sniffing the ground. Glass is a white, middle-aged woman, wearing a jacket and jeans, with a purse strapped around her shoulder. The jacket is monochrome, in all blues. But it also is decorative, with high-contrast horizonatal striping, ranging from light blues and aqua shades to dark blues. A line of logs creates a border on the ground behind her, separating the flat dirt path she is on from the dense forest. No foliage can be seen on most of the trees, which creates a background of vertical tree trunks. The trees are not large but plentiful. There is one small pine tree, about the height of a person, and a few leaves on the ground, but the forest is mostly a gray tone, created by the lack of color in the tree trunks.

American Council of the Blind member Susan Glass engages in an embodied audible moment in an interactive part of The Presidio: Goldsworthy Walk project, in San Francisco, CA. This research project was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Award-winning results

Recognized globally for research contributions, Access Hound team members have earned prestigious awards from The American Alliance of Museums, The American Council of the Blind, The European Heritage Association, Helen Keller Services, the Society for History in the Federal Government, the U.S. National Park Service, and the Washington Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation

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