Learn is read by people who often are not at their best when they arrive: veterans in their seventies and eighties, spouses reading on a phone in a hospital corridor, adult children trying to understand a benefits letter at midnight. Many of our readers are living with a serious respiratory illness, are fatigued from treatment, or have vision, hearing, dexterity, or attention difficulties. Accessibility is not a compliance checkbox for a site like this — it is the difference between a guide that helps and a guide that cannot be used.
Our commitment
We aim to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Level AA. Those guidelines organize accessibility around four principles: content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. We treat Level AA as the target for every page we publish, including our policy pages, and we review new templates and layout changes against it.
What we do
- Proper heading structure. Each page has a single H1 (the page title), with H2 and H3 headings nested in logical order. Screen reader users can jump through a long guide by heading rather than listening to the whole thing.
- Descriptive link text. Links say where they go — “the VA health care application page,” not “click here.” A list of links read out of context should still make sense.
- Alt text on images. Every meaningful image carries a text alternative written in respectful, plain language. Decorative images are marked so assistive technology can skip them.
- Sufficient color contrast. Body text, headings, and link colors are chosen to meet WCAG AA contrast ratios, and we never rely on color alone to convey meaning.
- Keyboard navigability. Menus, links, and interactive elements can be reached and activated with the Tab and Enter keys, with a visible focus indicator, so a mouse is not required.
- Responsive, resizable text. Pages reflow on small screens and remain readable when text is enlarged to 200% in the browser, without content being cut off or overlapping.
- Plain-language writing. We translate VA and clinical jargon into ordinary English, define acronyms on first use, keep sentences short, and break long processes into steps. Readability is an accessibility feature, particularly for readers coping with treatment-related fatigue or “chemo brain.”
- Text over graphics. Eligibility rules, deadlines, and figures are given as real text — never locked inside an image that a screen reader cannot read.
Known limitations
We want to be honest rather than post a statement claiming perfection.
Third-party advertising. This site is funded by Google AdSense display ads (see our Advertising Disclosure). Ad creatives are supplied by advertisers and served by Google’s systems. We do not write them, cannot edit them, and cannot guarantee that a given ad has adequate alt text, contrast, or keyboard behavior. We can, however, report and block ad units that are disruptive — for example ones that auto-play sound or interfere with reading — so please tell us if you encounter one.
Third-party and older content. Embedded content from other services, and older articles published before a template revision, may not yet meet every Level AA criterion. We remediate as we find issues and as articles come up for review.
Linked sites. We link heavily to VA.gov and other official resources. Those sites have their own accessibility statements and are outside our control.
Assistive technology
We aim to support current versions of common screen readers and browsers, including NVDA and JAWS with Windows browsers, VoiceOver on macOS and iOS, and TalkBack on Android, as well as browser zoom, high-contrast modes, and operating-system text-size settings. If you use an assistive tool that struggles with our pages, that is useful information for us — please report it.
Feedback and remediation
If you cannot access something on learn.lyricalguy.com, or if a page is hard to use with your assistive technology, email support@learn.lyricalguy.com. It helps if you can tell us:
- The web address of the page.
- What you were trying to do, and what happened instead.
- Your browser, device, and assistive technology, if you know them.
We aim to acknowledge accessibility reports within a few business days and to explain what we can fix and roughly when. Where a fix will take time, we will offer the content in another usable form — for example, sending you the text of a page by email — so that you are not left without the information while we work.
Ongoing work
Accessibility is maintained, not finished. We check new page templates for heading order, contrast, focus visibility, and keyboard operation before rolling them out, we revisit older guides as they are updated under our Editorial Policy, and we treat reader reports as priority issues. If our standard falls short somewhere, we would rather hear it from you than not know.
See also: About Us and Contact Us.