When the term “hospice” is brought up, many people cringe and become at least mildly uncomfortable. Hospice focuses on end-of-life care and is associated with death, a concept that causes fear in many people. At Faith & Hope Hospice and Palliative Care, we choose to focus on the other side of hospice care: life. Focusing on this aspect includes helping patients enjoy their lives at this very moment, and our goal is to make them as comfortable and fulfilled as possible.
Recently, Faith & Hope initiated care for Christian who is 21 years old and younger than most souls we serve. Despite the unfortunate timing, Christian remains a kind and gentle soul who cares about his family above all else. He spends most of his time with his family and girlfriend, and is always in high spirits during nursing visits. Our Faith & Hope community was so inspired by his positive attitude and kindness that we decided to show the same love back to him.
Since Christian is a dedicated Star Wars fan, we decided to contact Lucasfilm (production company of the Star Wars franchise) to see if we can set up something special for him. The kindhearted Lucas film employees responded by sending Christian a shipment of Star Wars merchandise, which included posters that were autographed by of the cast and crew of the films. We were lucky enough to be present and photograph Christian’s his pure joy and excitement while opening the gifts. This moment was enough to move the whole Faith & Hope staff to tears, and we’re honored to play a part in helping Christian and his family create joyous memories they can cherish forever.
Since Christian is also a big fan of the Transformers franchise, we reached out to Universal Studios and told them his story. They, too, responded with humbling generosity by giving Christian and his family front-of-the-line “VIP” passes at Universal Studios Hollywood. We hope that Christian enjoys these gifts as much as we enjoyed arranging them for him.
Since end-of-life is still a part of life, we should enjoy it as much as possible with our loved ones create valuable memories. Faith and Hope would like to encourage all families to acknowledge and embrace these moments by creating memories of joy whenever possible, and we wish you all a very joyous holiday season.
Faith and Hope Hospice
We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers).
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs. There may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to