Built to be read by everyone.
We work with institutions whose mandate is to serve the public. The site that carries our practice should hold itself to the same standard. Below is what we test against, what we have measured, and how to report something we've missed.
Our standard
We design and build to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA. That includes color-contrast minimums of 4.5:1 for body text and 3:1 for large display text, semantic HTML structure, keyboard reachability of every interactive element, alt text on meaningful images, and a logical reading order.
What we have measured
Color contrast is measured from the pixels the browser actually renders, not from the stylesheet — most of the text on this site sits over photographs, where the backdrop changes across the width of the word being measured. Every candidate is sampled on a grid and judged on its worst sample, at five viewport widths from 390px to 1440px, because a contrast failure can exist at one width and not another. Manual checks include keyboard navigation through every nav link, footer link, and form control, and screen-reader spot-checks of headings and landmarks.
We publish no automated score here. A single number invites a reader to re-run the tool against a build that has moved on, and it says less than naming what was checked and what was found.
Known limitations
We are not aware of any current accessibility blockers. Three notes for transparency:
— A small red full stop follows some display headlines. Where it falls over the brighter part of a photograph it does not reach the 3:1 minimum for large text; measured at its worst, it ranges from 1.45:1 to 2.51:1. It is retained deliberately. The mark is decorative punctuation, it carries no information, and nothing is lost to a reader who cannot resolve it. Every headline it follows meets its own contrast minimum.
— The hover-coordinated lists across the site (services, fellowship leaves, cohort progression, modules, engagement tables, career timeline, impacts lists) use a sibling-desaturation pattern. Sibling rows dim slightly while one is hovered. This is a visual emphasis only; all rows remain reachable and readable by keyboard and screen reader, and the desaturated rows still meet contrast minimums.
— Photographs that illustrate a section rather than carry its meaning are marked decorative and given empty alt text, so a screen reader passes over them instead of announcing a description that repeats the prose beside them. Photographs that do carry meaning — a named person, a specific setting — are described. The substance of every section lives in its text, not in its images.
Report an issue
If you encountered an accessibility barrier on this site — a missing label, an unreadable color combination, a control you couldn't reach by keyboard, an alt attribute that doesn't reflect the image — please tell us through the inquiry form. We respond to every accessibility report within five business days and prioritize fixes that affect site-wide reach.