How PS Is Striving to Be More Accessible

When we relaunched as PS in June 2024, one of our missions was to make wellness more accessible. Not everyone has equal access to health information and care, and we want to put our content within reach of as many humans as possible. One way we do that is by offering our content for free — including our massive library of workout videos on YouTube. The next step is making sure that our content is accessible to people with disabilities, including people with visual and hearing impairment.

We've already made improvements to our site to make it more accessible. When choosing the new typefaces and colors for our reimagined brand, we conducted testing to ensure that our website met accessibility standards for people with visual impairment. When possible, we are adding "alt text" to photos — that is, clear and literal descriptions of each image for people who use screen readers. On Instagram, we are adding descriptions of images and videos to our captions going forward, and we'll include closed captions as often as possible in social video. On our website, we avoid graphics and animation that could prove challenging for visually impaired people.

We are also dedicated to highlighting stories of people in the disability community, including personal essays, celebrity features, interviews with disability rights advocates, and in-depth coverage of the Paralympics. But we are especially proud of our new All Access special issue, guest edited by activist and author Alice Wong, which celebrates how disabled folks are making nature more accessible.

That said, we still have improvements to make to our site's functionality. For instance, our image galleries don't allow for alt text descriptions, which we are working to fix with our engineering team. We also asked our engineers to audit our current website and identify accessibility issues and concerns. We have identified some weaknesses — such as ARIA roles, which provide semantic meanings to content for screen readers — that we are working to refine.

And finally, we are actively educating ourselves about how to make our written, social, and video content even more accessible. In October, we're hosting a pair of two-hour accessibility training sessions for our content team, led by Perkins Access, which has a long history of experience in the digital accessibility space.

Given that roughly one in four adults (27 percent) in the United States has a disability, one thing is clear: our content isn't fully inclusive until it's also accessible.