Background
NYC Votes serves more than 5.5 million voters across New York City, so accessibility could never be treated as an optional layer. The website needed to work for people with different abilities, languages, devices, and ways of interacting with digital services.
When Phases began the work, the existing design had significant accessibility gaps. Colour contrast was inconsistent, forms lacked the labelling assistive technology needed, keyboard use was limited, and screen-reader support required substantial work.
For a civic platform, those issues have consequences beyond usability. A voter who cannot understand a form, use a keyboard to complete an action, or hear the right information through a screen reader may be unable to access an important public service independently.
The challenge was therefore very specific: rebuild the experience so that accessibility worked throughout the website, while still supporting a large multilingual audience and complex voting information.
Solution
Phases rebuilt the experience around accessibility from the structure upward.
Semantic HTML and correct heading hierarchies gave assistive technologies better context. ARIA labels were added where dynamic content required them, forms were revised to work properly with assistive technology, and interactions were made operable using a keyboard alone.
Colour contrast was reviewed through both automated and manual checks, with design tokens helping us correct low-contrast combinations while preserving the visual character of the site.
Some of the harder work sat inside interactive voting experiences. Ranked-choice voting, for example, still needed to work for somebody using a screen reader or navigating without a mouse. We tested those interactions with JAWS and NVDA, axe DevTools, keyboard-only testing, browser zoom, and real devices.
The Umbraco implementation also had to support content in 14 languages, giving the NYC Votes team a practical way to publish election information for a very broad audience without weakening the accessibility work already built into the front end.
Impact
The strongest result was that people who had previously struggled to use the website could complete important voter tasks independently.
The finished platform achieved a 100% WCAG 2.2 accessibility audit score, supports content in 14 languages, and serves a voter population of more than 5.5 million people across New York City.
The accessibility work also went beyond automated scoring. Feedback from blind users confirmed that they could complete the voter registration process independently, while the NYC Board of Elections recognised the improvement in screen-reader compatibility.
The project also changed the way Phases works. Accessibility moved earlier into our design, development, and testing process rather than being treated as a final audit step. The lessons from NYC Votes now influence how we approach accessible Umbraco delivery on other projects as well.
You can also read Phases’ NYC Votes case study for more on the accessibility work, Umbraco implementation, and voter services experience.
Results
