The 19th’s mission is to give women and LGBTQ+ people — specifically those excluded from the promise of the 19th Amendment by their gender, race, ethnicity, class or disability – the information they need to fully participate in our democracy. Our mission is completely undermined if those we aim to reach can’t access our work. That’s why our product and technology team has made it a priority for 2026 to audit and improve the accessibility of our digital products.
Today marks the 15th annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which was created to bring visibility across the world to the importance of digital inclusion. And we’re recognizing this day by bringing our readers — that’s you — behind the scenes into our commitment to accessibility work and how we’re making it a priority this year and moving forward.
On the product and technology team, we are keenly aware that keeping up with the news is extremely difficult. We regularly conduct user research with our audience and hear from you about challenges navigating an overwhelming news landscape where it’s hard to know who to trust. We work every day to build products that aim to lower these barriers to consuming information, and digital accessibility is a critical part of that.
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We’ve always placed importance on digital accessibility and have been measuring it since we launched in 2020. We use standard browser tools that check for ways we can improve our site’s color scheme and structure to be more friendly to screen readers (check out Google’s Lighthouse tool if you want to nerd out a bit).
But this year, we are taking that work a step further. Our full stack engineer, Michelle Hughes, is partnering with our technical product manager, Abby Blachman, to manually audit and prioritize a list of accessibility fixes and improvements we can make to our products, including our website, our newsletters, surveys we send out to readers and more. Hughes is a Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies, a certification she earned as part of her professional development work at The 19th in 2023.
Manual audits ensure we don’t miss what an automated checker might. We also invested in user testing with someone who uses a screen reader in order to give ourselves a true window into barriers readers with disabilities might face when using our website. Every member of our team has already contributed to several fixes and improvements that have come from these audits, including to our website’s navigation and to our article pages, and we plan to address even more in the coming months.
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But truly prioritizing accessibility work doesn’t just mean fixing what’s already broken. It means bringing intentionality into our product planning and engineering processes to ensure our team understands accessibility standards and incorporates them into new features we develop from the onset.
As we look ahead to where we’d like to be with product accessibility in the future, we plan to implement systems that make it easier for us to structure features according to accessibility best practices from their conception in addition to conducting audits to improve our readers’ current experience with our products and platforms. We still have work to do to further center accessibility best practices, but we are committed to prioritizing this essential step. Our mission necessitates it.
