ACCESSIBILITY
Banking that works for every member, on every device
Summit is committed to making our website, mobile app, branches, and documents usable by people with disabilities. Here is the standard we hold ourselves to and how to tell us when we miss it.
Our commitment
A credit union that leaves members out is not doing its job. Summit was chartered in 1948 on the idea that ordinary people should be able to get a fair loan and a safe place to save, and that commitment does not come with an asterisk about how someone reads a screen, hears a phone call, or moves through a branch lobby. Accessibility is treated here as part of building the thing, not as a repair made after a complaint.
In practice that means our digital team tests with screen readers and keyboard navigation before a page ships, our branch staff are trained to offer assistance without waiting to be asked, and our documents are produced in formats that can be enlarged, read aloud, or converted to braille. It also means we accept that we get things wrong sometimes, and that the fastest way to find those things is for a member to tell us.
This commitment covers our public website, online banking, the Summit mobile app, our ATMs, our printed and electronic statements, and the physical accessibility of all 42 branches. It applies to services delivered by our affiliates as well, and we hold vendors to the same expectation in the contracts we sign with them.
The standard we follow
We build to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.2, at Level AA. That is the benchmark most regulators, courts, and procurement teams point to, and it is specific enough to test against rather than aspire to. Where a guideline at Level AAA is easy to meet, such as higher contrast on body text, we meet it, but Level AA is the commitment.
Concretely, that means text can be resized to 200 percent without breaking the layout, color is never the only way information is conveyed, every image that carries meaning has a text alternative, form fields have visible labels rather than placeholder text alone, and every interactive element can be reached and operated with a keyboard in a sensible order with a visible focus indicator. Contrast on body text meets or exceeds a ratio of 4.5 to 1, and pages do not rely on hover to expose information.
In our branches and at our ATMs we follow the Americans with Disabilities Act Standards for Accessible Design. Every branch has an accessible entrance, an accessible teller position, and at least one ATM with audio output, a headphone jack, tactile keys, and reachable controls. Service animals are welcome in every location, and we do not ask for documentation.
How we test
Automated scanning runs against the site continuously and catches the mechanical problems: missing alternative text, unlabeled controls, contrast failures, broken heading order. Automated tools cannot tell you whether a page makes sense, so we also do manual testing with screen readers on both desktop and mobile, keyboard-only walkthroughs of the tasks members actually perform, and magnification testing at 200 and 400 percent. Every release of online banking and the mobile app goes through that manual pass before it reaches members.
We commission an independent accessibility audit of the website and the mobile app annually and use the findings to set the following year's remediation plan. Members with disabilities are included in usability testing for major changes, and they are compensated for their time.
Work in progress
Some parts of the site are not where we want them yet, and it is more useful to say so than to claim full conformance. Older PDF statements and archived rate sheets predating our current document pipeline are not fully tagged for screen readers, and we are converting them on a rolling schedule. Any of them can be supplied in an accessible format on request in the meantime, usually within two business days.
A small number of interactive tools, including two of our loan calculators, are being rebuilt so that results are announced to screen readers as they update rather than changing silently on the page. The same rebuild will remove the last places where a control depends on a mouse. Third-party content we embed, such as a payment network's card activation flow, is outside our direct control, and where a vendor cannot meet our standard we provide an equivalent path by phone or in a branch.
We publish progress against this list once a year in our annual report and update this page whenever a known issue is resolved. If something you rely on is on this list, tell us, and we will prioritize it. Member impact moves items up the queue faster than anything else.
Requesting an alternate format
Any document we produce can be provided in large print, braille, accessible electronic text, or read aloud over the phone by a member service representative. That includes account statements, loan documents, disclosures, the fee schedule, tax forms, and the annual report. There is no charge for any of it, and requesting an alternate format never delays a transaction or changes the terms of an account.
Call member service at (800) 555-0148 and say which document you need and which format you want. Large print and accessible electronic text are usually ready within two business days. Braille production takes about ten business days because it is handled by an outside vendor. You can also set a standing preference so that every statement and notice arrives in your chosen format automatically, without asking each time.
Assistance at a branch or on the phone
We accept relay service calls, including TTY, video relay, and captioned telephone, and our representatives are trained not to hang up on a relay operator. American Sign Language interpretation can be arranged for a branch appointment with three business days notice at no cost to you. If you would rather not come in at all, a branch team member can complete most account and loan business over the phone or by video, including document signing.
If you use a power of attorney, a representative payee arrangement, or a trusted contact, tell us once and we will note the account so you are not re-explaining it at every visit.
Telling us about a barrier
If any page, document, app screen, ATM, or branch is difficult or impossible for you to use, we want the specifics. Call member service at (800) 555-0148 and ask for the accessibility coordinator, use the form on our contact page, or write to the Accessibility Coordinator, Summit Federal Credit Union, 1948 Ridgeline Avenue, Suite 400, Summit Park.
The more detail you can give, the faster it gets fixed. Useful details include the address of the page or the name of the screen, what you were trying to do, the device and browser you were using, whether you were using a screen reader or magnification and which one, and what happened instead of what you expected. If none of that is convenient to gather, a sentence describing the problem is still worth sending.
We acknowledge every report within two business days with the name of the person handling it. Most issues are resolved within thirty days, and when a fix will take longer than that we tell you why and give you an interim way to complete whatever you were trying to do. You will hear from us when it is fixed, not just when it is logged.
This is a demonstration website. Summit Federal Credit Union is a fictional institution, and the contact details, timelines, and commitments described here are illustrative.
Something here not working for you
Tell us what happened and we will fix it, then tell you it is fixed.