Accessibility Statement

Date: 28 June 2025

Ancestry Ireland Unlimited Company (“Ancestry”, “we” or “our”) is committed to providing customers in the European Union with an accessible e-commerce service on our website. We have prepared this statement in accordance with the European Union (Accessibility Requirements of Products and Services) Regulations 2023 (SI 636/2023) (the “EAA”), to provide information on how we are committed to continuing our efforts to meet e-commerce accessibility standards under the EAA.

This Accessibility Statement only applies to the e-commerce services we provide to customers who live in a country in the European Union, however, our on-going goal is to provide this e-commerce service in an accessible manner for all of our customers.

Ancestry's e-commerce services

Ancestry's e-commerce services allow customers to purchase access to:

  • Family History digital research tools (tree-building platform, record search, automated hints, etc.), including digital images of historical documents, such as: census data; passenger/immigration lists; birth, marriage and death records, member-to-member messages and LifeStory: historical timelines and narratives based on related content.
  • DNA analysis for traits and genealogical matches services.

As a digital service, Ancestry does not use any products as part of the e-commerce services. 

We have outlined the specific accessibility requirements that we are subject to in the European Union in the Annex to this statement.

Purchases on Ancestry's e-commerce services:

You can make purchases using a credit card or debit card on our services. You are also able to use third party payment providers to make purchases on our website. These include Apple Pay, Google Pay, Magento (DE), PayPal, or PayPal credit. If you use a third party payment provider to make a purchase they may overlay their own technology onto the e-commerce services during when you make payment. This Accessibility Statement only applies to the Ancestry e-commerce services and not the third party payment provider technology. Please see the relevant payment provider's website for information on their approach to accessibility.

Our approach to accessibility

Ancestry follows accessibility best practices for making our e-commerce services; functionality for identification, security and payment; and identification methods, electronic signatures and payment services accessible. We are guided by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2. Some of the steps we take include:

  1. We design for and test with screen reading technologies such as NVDA and JAWS to ensure that our content can be presented in speech, braille, and potentially other formats.
  2. We design for and use a combination of manual and automated testing to ensure that:
    • The human language of our e-commerce content is specified, focus order is predictable, form fields are properly labelled, users are not redundantly prompted for information, errors are avoided as much as possible, and automatically detected errors are identified and communicated to the user in text.
    • Unexpected changes in context are not triggered on focus or input.
    We also reuse common headers, footers and other site elements (including help mechanisms) in our designs and code as much as possible. This ensures there is consistency in navigation and that elements are identified consistently across e-commerce pages. We also manually test for this as well.
  3. We design for and use a combination of manual and automated testing to ensure that:
    • Appropriate alternatives are provided for non-text content, including images and videos.
    • We use proper HTML to convey information, relationships, and a correct reading order.
    • Instructions don't rely on sensory characteristics.
    • Orientation of content is not programmatically restricted.
    • Form fields offer appropriate auto complete hints to browsers.
    • Color is not used as the only way to provide information.
    • Audio does not play automatically.
    • Text and non-text content meets contrast requirements; character, word, line, and paragraph spacing can be adjusted by the user.
    • The site remains functional when resized up to 200%.
    • Images of text are avoided when possible.
    • Content does not require multidimensional scrolling when viewed on a small viewport.
    • Character, word, line, and paragraph spacing can be adjusted by the user.
    • Content that appears on hover or focus meets accessibility standards.
  4. When selecting fonts and font sizes, Ancestry focuses on readability. We also do not take measures to prevent the user from substituting an alternative font of their own choosing.
  5. Ancestry performs regular automated and manual accessibility testing in order to ensure our e-commerce platform meets the four principles of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2, namely Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust.

Design of our services

When creating customer features for our e-commerce services, Ancestry focuses on accessibility using both prevention and detection. Some of the steps we take include:

  • Everyone who works on customer facing areas (designers, developers, quality assurance testers, and their managers) receives extensive accessibility training.
  • User experience designs are reviewed for accessibility by Ancestry's team of accessibility experts.
  • Developers are using tools to assist with the early detection of accessibility issues as code is written.
  • Ancestry employs an Accessibility Team of full-time staff members whose sole responsibility is accessibility. Most of these employees hold certificates from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals.
  • When an accessibility defect is identified, Ancestry treats it with high priority. These defects are immediately brought to the attention of the relevant team and tracked through to resolution. Once a team confirms a defect has been fixed, the updated code is retested for accessibility.

Our support services

We provide support services for Ancestry's e-commerce service via call centres and email.

Regarding the accessibility of our support services for our e-commerce service:

  • Call centre: our support services staff are trained to work with customers with hearing, speech or other communication related disabilities who connect through telecommunications relay services.
  • Email: an accessible communication method for those preferring non-realtime asynchronous text-based communication.

Regarding providing information on the accessibility of the e-commerce service, agents will provide general information about the accessibility of the service on request.

However, if the customer has more specific questions they will be routed to Ancestry's dedicated accessibility team.

Monitoring accessibility

We use a combination of automated and manual processes, employing screen readers and other assistive technologies to ensure that our e-commerce services remain usable for people with disabilities.

We also provide accessibility training to designers, developers, and testers who work on our content. We also perform regular manual and automated audits of mobile and web-content using screen readers, keyboards without a mouse, and magnification.

Contact us

If you are experiencing an accessibility concern, or would like to report any accessibility issue to route to our internal team of accessibility experts, please email us at [email protected].

Contact information for regular support via call centre or email is found here: https://support.ancestry.com/s/phonesupport?language=en_US.

If you are unhappy with our response, you have the right to make a complaint. As a provider of e-commerce services in Ireland, we are regulated by the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (“CCPC”). You can contact the CCPC by:

  • visiting their website at https://www.ccpc.ie/.
  • writing to Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, Bloom House, Railway Street, Dublin 1, D01 C576.

 

Annex – EAA Accessibility Requirements

All services within scope of the EAA are subject to the following requirements under Part 3 of Schedule 1 to the EAA:

“The provision of services in order to maximise their foreseeable use by persons with disabilities, shall be achieved by:

  1. ensuring the accessibility of the products used in the provision of the service, in accordance with Part 1 and, where applicable, Part 2,
  2. providing information, in the following manner, about the functioning of the service, and where products are used in the provision of the service, its link to these products as well as information about their accessibility characteristics and interoperability with assistive devices and facilities:
    1. making the information available via more than one sensory channel;
    2. presenting the information in an understandable way;
    3. presenting the information to users in ways they can perceive;
    4. making the information content available in text formats that can be used to generate alternative assistive formats to be presented in different ways by the users and via more than one sensory channel;
    5. presenting in fonts of adequate size and suitable shape, taking into account foreseeable conditions of use and using sufficient contrast, as well as adjustable spacing between letters, lines and paragraphs;
    6. supplementing any non-textual content with an alternative presentation of that content;
    7. providing electronic information needed in the provision of the service in a consistent and adequate way by making it perceivable, operable, understandable and robust;
  3. making websites, including the related online applications, and mobile device-based services, including mobile applications, accessible in a consistent and adequate way by making them perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, and
  4. where available, support services (help desks, call centres, technical support, relay services and training services) providing information on the accessibility of the service and its compatibility with assistive technologies, in accessible modes of communication.”

In addition, e-commerce services are subject to the following additional requirements in point (e) of Part 4 of Schedule 1 to the EAA:

“(e) in relation to e-commerce services -

  1. providing the information concerning accessibility of the products and services being sold when this information is provided by the responsible economic operator,
  2. ensuring the accessibility of the functionality for identification, security and payment when delivered as part of a service instead of a product by making it perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, and
  3. providing identification methods, electronic signatures, and payment services which are perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.”