Accessibility

We want our website, our classes and our Saturday studio to work for people with a wide range of abilities. If you hit a barrier, tell us and we’ll fix it or find another way to get you what you need.

We aim for this website to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at Level AA. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) publishes these guidelines. They explain how to make web pages usable by people with disabilities, including people who are blind or have low vision, people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and people with motor or cognitive disabilities.

Our site doesn’t fully meet that standard yet. The parts we know about are listed under “Known limitations” below.

Pages with our site menu have a “Skip to content” link at the top, and you can switch the site between a light setting and a dark setting.

What we aim for on this site:

• Headings, links and form fields that screen readers can follow
• Menus, forms and buttons that work with a keyboard, with a visible outline that shows where you are
• Text descriptions on photos that carry meaning
• Text with enough contrast to read

When we add pages, photos and forms, we aim to check them against the standard, and we work to fix what we find. We also rely on families, students and visitors to tell us when we’ve missed something.

Some parts of our own pages don’t meet the standard yet. We found them by checking our public pages, partly with an automated tool. We haven’t yet checked the site with a screen reader.

• On our Art Institute page, the six pictures of the course’s units are described only by each unit’s title, not by what they show.
• Some text has less contrast with its background than the standard asks: small grey labels on our test prep page, some grey text on our Art Institute and jobs pages, the large orange numbers on our home, Art Institute, test prep and jobs pages, and the orange role labels on the mentor cards on our Art Institute page.
• On a very narrow screen, 320 pixels wide, our Art Institute, test prep and contact pages scroll sideways.
• The box that holds the spam check on our forms, like the one on our contact page, has a label that screen readers may not read out.

We take each item off this list only when its fix is live on our site and we have checked the page again. Until then, if any of these gets in your way, or you need anything on this site in another form, email us at info@pacificcrestinstitute.com or call us at (858) 888-3156, and we’ll get it to you another way.

A few parts of the site come from other companies:

• payment fields from Stripe
• the spam check on our forms, from Cloudflare
• the Microsoft sign in page for school accounts
• lesson videos on YouTube

We choose tools that work with assistive technology where we can, and we tell the company when we find a problem. We can’t promise that every part they control meets the standard. If one of them gets in your way, contact us and we’ll help you another way, for example by phone or by email.

Our lesson videos play on YouTube. If a video doesn’t have captions you can use, ask us and we’ll help. Some printable pages, like our flyers and syllabus, are designed for paper. If you need any of them in another format, ask us.

The Saturday Art Institute meets in Rancho Santa Fe. If you or your student need an accommodation in class or on the way in, tell us before the class starts and we will talk with you about what is possible.

If something on our site doesn’t work for you, or you need information in another format, like large print or plain text, contact us. Tell us the page and what happened, and we’ll get back to you.

• Email: info@pacificcrestinstitute.com
• Phone: (858) 888-3156
• Or use our contact form