A foundation that preserves a piece of American history should be open to every visitor who wants to learn it. Roughly one in four U.S. adults lives with a disability, and the Annie Oakley Center Foundation serves a broad public — including older visitors and people using screen readers, keyboard navigation, or assistive technology. An inaccessible website quietly turns those people away.
There's a practical dimension, too. Because the Foundation operates a public museum, its website is treated as an extension of a place of public accommodation under the ADA — and web accessibility lawsuits have climbed in recent years, with small nonprofits increasingly the target. Meeting recognized standards isn't just the right thing to do; it's the responsible thing to do.
So we built accessibility in from the start rather than bolting it on later. The site is designed around WCAG 2.1 AA — the standard courts and regulators point to — with semantic markup, full keyboard navigation, descriptive alt text on imagery, logical heading structure, and color contrast checked against real readability thresholds. The same choices that make the site welcoming to every visitor also make it clearer to search engines, so doing right by people and performing well online turn out to be the same work.