Accessibility Statement

Outdoors is committed to making the outdoors easier to plan for, for people of all abilities. That commitment applies to this website and our apps, and we treat accessibility as ongoing work rather than a finished state.

Conformance Status

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) define requirements for making web content more accessible. Outdoors is partially conformant with WCAG 2.1 Level AA. "Partially conformant" means some parts of the content do not fully conform to the standard.

We are not claiming full conformance, because we have not verified every screen against every success criterion — and our interactive maps, in particular, do not meet it today. The limitations we know about are listed below.

What We Do

Accessibility is built into how we design and build Outdoors. In practice that means:

• Semantic HTML and ARIA: We use native elements and landmark structure, and add ARIA only where native semantics fall short.
• Keyboard support: We build interactive components to be reachable and operable by keyboard, with visible focus indicators.
• Color and contrast: Our design tokens are chosen to meet WCAG AA contrast ratios for body text and interface elements, including in dark mode.
• A sunlight (high-contrast) theme: In addition to light and dark, for glare and low-vision readability outdoors.
• Reduced motion: We honor the prefers-reduced-motion system setting and suppress non-essential animation.
• Text resizing and zoom: Layouts use relative units so text can be enlarged without breaking the page.
• Skip links and headings: So screen-reader and keyboard users can bypass repeated navigation.
• Alternative text: We author descriptive alt text for the images we publish, and label decorative images so assistive tech skips them.

Where we fall short of any of the above, we treat it as a defect. Please tell us — see Feedback below.

Known Limitations

We would rather name these than let you discover them. Where we have an alternative, it is listed with the limitation:

• Interactive maps. The map canvas is difficult to operate with a screen reader or by keyboard alone. Alternative: every map-based view has a list view of the same results, and each trail, campground, park, and water body has a text detail page with the same information.
• User-uploaded photos. Photos submitted by other users often have no alt text, because we cannot author it on their behalf. Alternative: where a contributor supplies a caption we use it as the image's description, and no essential information is conveyed by user photos alone.
• Elevation profiles and charts. Some data visualizations are not yet fully described to assistive technology. Alternative: the underlying figures (distance, elevation gain, high point) are available as text on the same page.
• Third-party and agency content. Embedded content and the agency PDFs we link to are outside our control and may not be accessible.
• Older screens. Parts of the app built earlier have not been re-audited against our current standards.

Accessibility Information About Places

Separate from the accessibility of this website: many listings show accessibility details about the place itself — accessible campsites, parking, restrooms, and trail surface.

Treat that information as a starting point, not a guarantee. It comes from agency datasets and public sources, and it can be incomplete, out of date, or wrong. Where we have no verified answer we show nothing rather than guessing, but a listed feature can still be out of service or seasonally closed. If accessible access is essential to your trip, confirm it directly with the managing agency or operator before you travel.

Compatibility

Outdoors is designed to work with current versions of major browsers and assistive technologies, including screen readers (JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, TalkBack), screen magnification, speech recognition, and keyboard-only navigation. We cannot test every combination, and older browsers or assistive-tech versions may behave differently.

Technical Specifications

Accessibility of Outdoors relies on HTML, WAI-ARIA, CSS, and JavaScript. It depends on these technologies being supported by your browser and any assistive technology you use.

Assessment Approach

We assess accessibility through internal review: automated checks in development, manual keyboard and screen-reader testing of new and changed interfaces, and contrast verification against our design tokens. We have not commissioned a third-party audit or formal user testing with people with disabilities; when we do, we will say so here and update the conformance status accordingly.

Feedback

If you hit an accessibility barrier on Outdoors, we want to hear about it — reports from people using the site are the fastest way we find real problems.

• Email: hello@theoutdoorsapp.com
• Contact form: Contact Us

If you can, include:

• The page URL where you ran into the problem
• What you were trying to do, and what happened instead
• The browser and assistive technology you were using, if any

We aim to respond within 5 business days. If something blocks you from information you need, say so and we will provide it another way while we work on the fix.