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Accessibility

Accessible by design.

The Esplanade is for everyone — and so is its website. The new site is built to WCAG 2.1 AA from the ground up, so visitors who navigate by keyboard, screen reader, or assistive technology get the same welcome as everyone else.

Our commitment

A baseline, not an afterthought.

The Esplanade Association is committed to meeting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Level AA across this site. The previous site fell short of that standard; this one treats accessibility as a structural requirement, designed in from the first wireframe rather than retrofitted at the end.

That means an experience that works with a keyboard alone, that reads cleanly in a screen reader, that holds up at 200% zoom, and that meets AA contrast everywhere — for four million annual park-goers of every ability.

What we've done

Concrete measures, baked into the build.

Every page in this wireframe already follows these practices — they are the foundation, not a wish list.

  • Semantic landmarks (header, nav, main, footer) and a skip-to-content link on every page.
  • Full keyboard navigation with a visible focus ring on every interactive element.
  • An AA-contrast color system — text and controls meet or exceed 4.5:1 against their backgrounds.
  • Screen-reader labels on every image and placeholder, so non-visual users know what each slot depicts.
  • Respects prefers-reduced-motion — animation is suppressed for visitors who ask for it.
  • Resizable text up to 200% with no loss of content or function, on a fluid responsive layout.
  • Labelled form fields with programmatic associations and live-region status messages.
  • Descriptive link text — no bare “click here”; every link makes sense out of context.
  • A logical, single-h1 heading order on each page so structure is navigable by headings.

Conformance & feedback

How we get to a formal AA conformance.

This is a wireframe prototype, so it carries no final visual design and no formal audit yet. In the build phase, a full WCAG 2.1 AA audit — automated testing plus manual keyboard and screen-reader review — produces a documented conformance statement that ships with the site and is re-checked on every release.

Accessibility is never finished. If you hit a barrier on this site, or you need content in another format, please tell us at info@esplanade.org. We treat accessibility reports as priority issues.

Integration slots

How we tame platform fragmentation.

The current site juggles many disconnected platforms — donations here, ticketing there, a separate map, a separate calendar. The new site keeps each one, but contains it behind a labeled, accessible integration slot.

Each slot below marks exactly where a third-party platform plugs in. Staff edit the surrounding content in the CMS without ever touching an integration, and the architecture stays legible: anyone can see, in one place, every external system the site depends on and which pages it touches. Each tile links back here, so the production wiring path is always one click away.

See a slot in context on Visit →