What I found. What I fixed.

The sponsor strip at the bottom of each screen showed only the national sponsors and the sponsors for the county you picked. There is no national sponsor yet, and most counties have no sponsor yet. If you picked one of those counties, or skipped the pick, the strip showed nothing, even though sponsors had signed.

Until a sponsor serves your county, the strip now shows every sponsor, one after another. National sponsors come first, then the rest by tier and by name. When a sponsor does serve your county, the strip works as before: national sponsors first, then the sponsors for your county. If you picked a county with no sponsor, the strip says so in one line. The picture you can save of your route names the first sponsor in the strip, so it carries a sponsor too. Your pick still stays on your device, and I never receive it. I added one clause to the Terms of Use, the Privacy Policy and the About page. It says the strip lists every sponsor in turn when no sponsor serves your county. The Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy are now dated November 13, 2026. If you have an account, you will be asked once, on your account screen, to accept the changed Terms of Use. Agreements already signed stay as signed.

The crisis box has three buttons: Call 988 and press 1, Text 838255, and Chat. Chat opened the Veterans Crisis Line home page. From there you had to find the chat yourself. In a crisis, one extra step is one too many.

I pointed Chat at the Veterans Crisis Line's own chat page. The words on the button did not change. I made this fix on its own, ahead of the other changes, because it is about safety. After it went live, I opened Chat on the live site, and it opened that chat page.

On November 11 I changed every “As seen in” line to “22 news outlets across 11 states.” I counted Areawide News as an outlet but not as a state, because its stories print no state name. That was too strict. Areawide News is in Salem, Arkansas, and its page links to election results for Fulton County and Sharp County.

Every “As seen in” line now reads “23 news outlets across 12 states.” The In the News page reads “23 news outlets in 12 states.” I also counted The Hometown Register in Mount Carmel, Illinois, which covered my talk at Southeastern Illinois College on November 10. I rebuilt the sponsor sheet for businesses to the same count, along with its pictures and its printable file. An outlet in Arkansas counts for Arkansas, even when a story does not print the state's name. The entry for November 11 below shows the count as it stood that day.

The page for sponsors was called Supported By. The page for people and businesses who give was called Supporters. A sponsor is a business that pays to back the tool. A supporter gives any amount, once or monthly, and can be a person or a business. Those names blurred the line. The menu was also not in alphabetical order.

The page for sponsors is now called Sponsored By, at vbgps.org/sponsored-by. The page for people and businesses who give is now called Supported By, at vbgps.org/supporters. Supported By used to mean sponsors. Now it means anyone who gives, a person or a business. If you saved the old address, vbgps.org/supported-by, it still works, and so does every page under it. All of them take you to Sponsored By. In the Privacy Policy, the Supporter Terms, the Terms of Use and the About page, I changed only those two page names. New sponsors get the agreement with the updated page name. Agreements already signed stay as signed. Each sponsor who signed gets one line about the change in my next sponsor note. I also put the menu in alphabetical order. The menu now links to all four pages: Sponsored By, Sponsors, Support the tool and Supported By. So I took the three green buttons off the bottom of every page.

The home page and the sponsors page said stories about this tool had run in 18 newspapers across 9 states. By November 11 the count was 22 news outlets across 11 states. One of the 22 is a television station, so “newspapers” was wrong too.

Every “As seen in” line now reads “22 news outlets across 11 states.” I count Areawide News in Salem, Arkansas as an outlet but not as a state, because its stories print no state. The In the News page lists each story with its outlet and date. I also rebuilt the sponsor sheet, its pictures and its printable file, to the same count.

On November 11 I saw that the Route Pass, the card you can save or share, drew the logo with a ring around the compass and a wide gap between the compass and the name. That is not the logo I use everywhere else.

I redrew the Route Pass on the screen and on the saved picture with the logo I use everywhere else. The ring is gone and the compass sits close to the name. On the saved picture I also sized the name to match the compass and centered the whole logo.

On several routes, including the one for a family member whose Veteran has died, the card above the result named a VSO representative and showed only the sentence about fees. It did not say the help is free.

The card now shows the same sentence the other routes show: “You can get free help from an accredited VSO representative to navigate your benefits.” The sentence about fees stays under it.

The Louisiana Veterans Homes card left out the state's own words “may be eligible,” so it read as a promise of free housing. Some Alabama license fees did not match the state's own page. An Arkansas property tax guide link no longer opened. Twenty cards showed a limit, such as a top dollar amount or a maximum number of semesters, as a fixed figure.

I checked all 34 cards against each state's own pages and edited them. I could not read the source pages for 13 other flagged cards that day. I read all but two of them by hand on October 30 and edited the ones that needed it. On that day the two Idaho cards still waited on a state site that was down. On October 31 I read both from an archived copy of that site. The Louisiana card now uses the state's own words, “may be eligible.” The twenty cards that showed a limit now read “Up to.” The Alabama fees match the state's page. The Arkansas link opens the state's own tax guide.

From September 19, the sponsors page said an attorney held an “accreditation-boundary opinion.” No such opinion was on file. A review caught it on October 21.

I took the words out the same day. The page no longer names a legal opinion. A claim about someone else's work stays off the page until the work exists.

The draft said an accredited attorney or claims agent can charge a fee “only after the VA has decided your first claim.” My review panel checked it against the federal rule on fees, section 14.636 of Title 38 of the Code of Federal Regulations. The rule works claim by claim, not once for all your claims. The page was not live yet.

The sentence now reads “only for help after the VA's first decision on that claim.” The page went up with the corrected sentence.

A review panel found several problems. Three are described here. If a browser refused to save anything, the tool crashed. A double tap could answer question 1 by accident. On a very short or zoomed-in screen, the header that stays fixed at the top covered more than a third of the page and left little room to read. A large screen zoomed to 400 percent is one example.

A browser that refuses to save no longer crashes the tool. A double tap no longer answers question 1. On a screen shorter than 480 pixels, the header now scrolls away with the page. Each fix has a check that fails on the old version and passes on the new one, so the check catches it if it ever comes back.

The Massachusetts Veterans Homes card said each care level carries a $1,500 spousal exemption from income. The Chelsea Home's own page lists that spouse rate for long-term care and memory loss care only. For residential care it posts none. The card was marked as an error on October 18 and I read the page by hand again on October 30.

The card now gives the $1,500 spousal exemption for long-term care and memory loss care only. For residential care it gives the $300 personal exemption for a Veteran without a spouse and says the page posts no rate for a Veteran with a spouse. I did this so the card says only what the home's page says.

The home page said every stop starts at an official VA.gov link. Some stops send you to your state or territory's own government site instead, so the line was not complete.

The line now reads: “Every stop starts at an official VA.gov link or your state or territory's own government site, with free help from an accredited VSO representative along the way.” A VSO is a Veterans Service Organization. I checked the line against all ten stops first.

Colorado's card for Guard dependents did not use the state law's own words about how long an impairment must last. Arizona's relief fund, Connecticut's dental program and Pennsylvania's gratuity showed a maximum amount as a fixed amount. Alaska's Purple Heart plate showed a $30 fee that no source states. Indiana's link to a state memo was dead.

I read each flagged card against its official source and made the edits. Colorado now uses the statute's own words. Those three maximums now read “Up to.” The Alaska fee is gone. The Indiana link opens the live memo. I also put the standard price beside reduced fees, such as the $50 Indiana park pass, so a Veteran can see what the discount is off of.

Two outside artificial intelligence (AI) reviews read my pages with scripts turned off. Scripts are the small programs that make a page move. The home page showed a fixed “46 days to launch” where the real count was 30.

Without scripts, the pages now show a fixed launch line in place of a count. With scripts on, the live count is unchanged.

The state search did not find the District of Columbia for “Washington DC” or “D.C.” It did not find the U.S. Virgin Islands for “USVI” or the Northern Mariana Islands for “CNMI.” At 200 percent text size, the box shrank so far that on a 320-pixel screen it had no room to show what you typed.

The search now ignores periods, commas and extra spaces, and it knows those names. The box now keeps room for what you type, even at large text sizes. At 200 percent text that is 102 pixels on a 320-pixel screen and 165 on a 390-pixel screen.

Before you choose a state, the instruction “Choose your state or territory first.” was faint against its background. Its contrast with the background measured 2.74 to 1, and the step labels measured 2.52 to 1. The usual minimum for readable text is 4.5 to 1.

I stopped dimming the whole box. Only the title is muted now. The instruction measures 6.84 to 1 and the step labels 5.61 to 1. A lock icon still marks the step.

Every step checkbox announced “checked off” to a screen reader whether or not you had checked it. An automated accessibility check also flagged the logo link's spoken name as not matching the words on the screen.

Each checkbox now announces its real state. The logo link's spoken name is now built from the visible words themselves, so the check passes and a voice-control user can say what they see.

Lines for surviving spouses stated, with no VA page behind them, who can and cannot use VA health care, Veteran Readiness and Employment (VR&E) and burial in a national cemetery. Other lines told Veterans to request a trauma-informed counselor when they contact VR&E. One said most Veterans never use the burial pre-need eligibility determination because they do not know it exists.

I decided the tool never gives advice on eligibility or on what to ask for. Each line now follows what a VA page I read says, or it is gone. The surviving-spouse lines now report what the VA states on its pages. For health care, the VA page is about the Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Department of Veterans Affairs (CHAMPVA) for spouses, dependents and survivors.

The link labeled “How to file a disability claim” opened a VA.gov page that returned “page not found” that day. I confirmed it was dead three ways: a browser, a plain request and my own link checker.

I pointed the link at a VA.gov page on filing a disability claim and confirmed that it loaded and matched its label that day. I still run the VA link check that caught this. A separate check now stops any change to the tool's VA wording that has no VA source behind it.