About This Website

This website was built with the intention of being clear and accessible to a wide range of users. In the making of this website, PHAME researched best practices related to accessible web design, and incorporated our learnings into the final design.

PHAME staff also met with current students to discuss their preferences and experiences with various websites, and their feedback directly influenced the website you see today.

Some of our design choices may stand out to you as being unusual or contrary to current design trends. For instance, this site uses very little all-caps text, has few moving images, and uses a larger font size than you find on most websites. According to our research, these design choices make the site more accessible to people with disabilities. Our hope is that by following these design choices our site will better serve our students, and will also act as a guide for other organizations to make their own sites more accessible.

Our Design Choices

Here is a list of some of the design choices we have made when designing this site:

• We use clean, sans serif fonts. Our headings are Futura PT, and our body font is Proxima Soft. Both are regarded as accessible fonts for people with limited vision.
• We avoid using all-caps for headings because they can be difficult for some people to decipher.
• We use high-contrast colors for text, i.e. dark text on white background and light text on dark background. High-contrast is regarded as accessible for people with limited vision.
• We never put text on top of an image because this can be difficult to read for people with limited vision.
• We do not use pop-ups, and our one slideshow switches slides slowly in order to avoid a sense that something on screen is flashing. This is more accessible for people who experience seizures, and also for people who have difficulty focusing when there is a moving element.
• We add alt text to images so that screen readers can identify what is pictured.
• When creating online forms, we also provide alternative forms of access such as phone numbers and email addresses.
• We embed hyperlinks in text and make them clear, concise, and understandable out of context. For instance, in a sentence that reads "Click here for the tuition assistance form," we hyperlink the words "tuition assistance form" instead of the words "click here." This is helpful for people using screen reader technology because they can scan the links without reading all of the other text.

If you have feedback regarding our website, or if you've noticed a bug we should fix, please fill out this form. We'd love to hear from you!
You can also email us at info@phamepdx.org