Accessibility
At Deaf & Melanin Collective Psychotherapy Inc., we are deeply committed to ensuring our virtual therapeutic environment is inclusive and accessible to all.
In sessions
American Sign Language is a complete language, cultural anchor, and fundamental human right. We provide direct psychotherapy in ASL, honoring its linguistic integrity, depth, and rich emotional expression without the barrier of a third party in individual sessions.
We eliminate the barriers of traditional care by providing direct communication in ASL.
For our DeafBlind community members requiring tactile communication or specific visual modifications, we work in close partnership with you to coordinate localized support such as Pro-Tactile interpreters, Co-Navigators, or SSPs to facilitate your sessions.
For DeafBlind requiring tactile support, we make every effort to work with you and to seek on-site Pro-Tactile interpreters, tactile facilitators, or Co-Navigators in your local area whenever available.
Supporting mixed-hearing and immigrant households through a vetted roster of BIPOC and multilingual interpreters.
We actively support mixed-hearing relationships, immigrant households, and diverse families through our dedicated roster of BIPOC and multilingual interpreters, fostering mutual understanding, deep connection, and shared strength.
While the availability of these local professionals varies by region and cannot be guaranteed, we pledge to advocate for your needs and strive to secure the linguistic equity and care you deserve.
This website
This site is built to WCAG 2.2 Level AA guidelines; not independently audited or certified.
Certification requires an audit by a qualified independent third party, which is separate work that has not been carried out. What follows describes what the site actually does, so it can be judged rather than taken on trust.
Each page is one document with a single first-level heading and a heading order that never skips a level, so the heading list a screen reader produces reads as an outline of the page rather than a jumble. The page is divided into named regions — a banner, the main content and a footer — and every navigation region carries a name, so they can be jumped between directly instead of read through.
Everything here can be reached and operated with a keyboard alone. The first thing the Tab key reaches on every page is a link that skips the navigation and moves straight to the main content; it stays out of the way until it is focused, and it moves onto the screen when it is. There are no menus that only open on hover, no keyboard traps, and nothing that responds to a mouse alone.
Whatever the keyboard is focused on is drawn with a ring around it, and the ring is visible on every background this site uses. It is a solid outline in the deep purple of the practice’s own palette with a gold inner stroke; on the dark panels the outer ring switches to cream so that it never disappears into the color behind it. Gold is never used on its own as a focus indicator, because gold on this site’s light ground is too faint to be seen — and the focus indicator is the first thing a keyboard user finds.
There is no photograph of any person anywhere on this site. The only images are the practice’s own logotype and monogram, and each of them repeats a name that is already written beside it as text, so they are marked as decorative and a screen reader passes over them rather than announcing the same name twice.
Every text color is checked against the background it is actually painted on — read out of a real browser at the values it computes, not from a table written down somewhere — and every combination on this site meets or exceeds the WCAG AA threshold for its size. The check runs across every page at three screen widths, and a page that fails it does not ship. Contrast is treated here as a core requirement rather than a finishing touch, because the people this practice serves include DeafBlind clients, for whom vision loss is often progressive.
This site carries no analytics, no advertising pixel, no embedded social widget and no fonts loaded from anyone else’s server. It makes no request to any machine other than the one serving the page, so no company other than the hosting provider receives a request from your visit. It also has no form of any kind — no message box, no service selector, no upload. On a practice organized around Deaf identity, race and mental health, the address of the page being read is itself sensitive, and a form asking why you were getting in touch would collect a great deal more than that. The website itself stores nothing about your visit; the standard server logs the hosting provider keeps are described on the privacy page.
On macOS, Safari moves the Tab key between form controls only unless you turn on “Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage” in its Advanced settings. Until you do, links on any website are reached with Option and Tab together. That is a Safari preference rather than anything about this site, and both routes were tested here.
A barrier is anything on this website that stops you from getting what you need — a page that will not work with your screen reader, text you cannot read against its background, or a control your keyboard cannot reach.
This page does not list a way to report a barrier yet, because the practice’s direct contact details are not published on this site yet.