The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is committed to making all agency programs and services, including Information and Communication Technology (ICT), accessible to everyone.
Our policy
While our baseline is complying with federal standards, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the 1998 Amendment to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, our goal is to exceed them. This can only be achieved with an intentional focus on accessibility for every feature of our websites. To that end, NASA follows an accessibility-first approach, encouraging all those involved with implementing our public websites to take ownership of accessibility as a part of their role in the project.
At minimum, federal agencies are required to comply with Level A and AA of WCAG 2.0, the international standard for web accessibility set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). We are striving to exceed that and meet WCAG 2.1 A and AA, at minimum.
As part of our process for creating more accessible websites, NASA created a position for an accessibility lead and that position is filled by our Section 508 Program Coordinator, Courtney Ritz.
To learn more about other areas of accessibility policy and practice at NASA outside our web presence, please visit our Section 508 Program web page.
Our process
In building this website, NASA is taking several steps to address accessibility:
- Conducting research to incorporate the needs of individuals with disabilities into the design and development of this website;
- Creating and maintaining a design system that includes accessibility considerations throughout the site;
- Incorporating web accessibility testing during development to detect issues via automated scanning, manual testing, and usability testing with people with disabilities;
- Using a built-in automatic accessibility checker to help our content editors catch and fix errors within their web content;
- Following a strategic plan to help maintain accessibility; and
- Continuously testing and remediating new accessibility issues as they are discovered.
While we are deploying an automatic checker to perform a first pass to catch accessibility errors, NASA is using web professionals to remedy errors found and engaging accessibility experts to spot-check content and verify results.
Though our intent is to meet or exceed accessibility requirements for all new content, there will be some legacy content and applications that may not yet be accessible. We are working through remediating or retiring this content. If you come across this content, reach out to the email address to request an accessible version.
Contact us
Please email us at AssistedProgramComplaint@nasa.gov if you:
- Have difficulty viewing, interacting, selecting, and navigating any element of a page (i.e., lists, media, graphics, form fields, search boxes) with adaptive technology;
- Would like to request an accessible alternative to inaccessible content; or
- Have questions about our accessibility policy.
When reporting an issue, please indicate what browser and assistive technology you are using at the time of the issue, as well as the web page or document URL(s).
Please note that this email address is only for submitting web accessibility issues. For more general inquiries, please see the Contact NASA web page.
Last Updated: November 14, 2023
Editor: Brian Dunbar