Accessibility

Last updated 25 September 2026

Weather information should reach everyone, including people who use a keyboard, a screen reader, magnification or high contrast. This page says what the site does, where it still falls short, and how to tell us about a barrier.

Our aim

We work toward the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at level AA. The site has not been audited against them by an outside party, so this page does not claim conformance. It describes what is built today.

What the site does

Pages are real documents

• Forecasts, alerts, climate, tides, rivers and every other section are written into the HTML by the server, with headings in order, lists and data tables, so a screen reader gets the whole page without waiting for a script, and with scripting off.
• Every page declares its language, and has a unique title and a breadcrumb trail.
• The menu opens with the keyboard and without JavaScript: on a phone it is a real checkbox that announces its state, and on a wide screen each group opens on keyboard focus.

Charts have words and tables

• Charts carry a text label for screen readers, and the numbers behind the forecast, climate, tide and river charts are also given as tables (hour by hour, day by day, month by month), readable without color.
• The forecast pages open with a sentence of what matters now, and every forecast period keeps the forecaster's own words, not only an icon.
• On a forecast page, Read aloud speaks the place, the alerts in force, the conditions now and the next three periods, with units spelled out, using your device's own voice. Nothing leaves your device.

Keyboard

• Links, buttons, menus and dialogs work with Tab, Enter, Space and Escape.
• On the radar, the main controls have keyboard shortcuts: change radar, change product and tilt, step through the loop, play and pause, split the view. Press ? on the radar, or open Settings, for the full list.
• Dialogs and sheets on the radar are marked as dialogs and close with Escape.

Color and contrast

• A light and a dark theme, following your device's setting until you choose one with the button in the header.
• Alert colors are never the only signal: every alert is named in words, and warnings are set apart by their card as well as their color.
• The radar offers color-blind-safe scales (Cividis, Viridis and Batlow for reflectivity; Vik and Berlin for velocity) under Settings, Tools, Color tables, and can load your own color table.
• Units can be switched between US and metric, and hover readouts give the value under the pointer as a number.

Motion

• The radar loop never starts on its own; it plays only when you press play.
• With your device set to reduce motion, the map moves to a place without the flying animation, the wind layer draws its streaks once and holds them still, and pulsing outlines around the most dangerous warnings hold still while staying visible.

Known limits

• The radar map is a picture. Radar, satellite and model layers are drawn on a canvas with WebGL, which a screen reader cannot read. The same information is available in words elsewhere: the alerts themselves in the alerts list and on the alerts pages, rain starting and stopping on each forecast page, storm cells in the cell list, and gauges, tides and fires on their own pages.
• Pinch zoom on the radar page. On the radar page the browser's page zoom is turned off so that a pinch zooms the map rather than the controls. Every other page can be zoomed freely, and text zoom in the browser settings works everywhere.
• Hover readouts. Some values on charts and on the map appear on hover or touch; on charts they are also in the table beside them, but on the map they are not.
• Agencies' own images. Some pages show a map or figure made by a government agency, such as the Drought Monitor's weekly map. Each has a text description, but the detail inside an agency's picture is not always in words.
• Radar captures in articles have captions and alternative text saying what each shows, not every detail in the image.

Not for safety decisions

Whatever your setup, do not rely on this site for warnings. Wireless Emergency Alerts on your phone and NOAA Weather Radio (which has receivers with strobe lights, bed shakers and text displays for people who are deaf or hard of hearing) are the channels built for that.

Report a barrier

If something on the site does not work with the way you browse, write to contact@weatherovertime.com with the page's address, what you were trying to do, and your browser and assistive technology if you can. We read every message and aim to reply within five working days; where we cannot fix something quickly, we will send the information you needed in another form.