New Grant to The Bridge Food Center helps keep food costs down for low-income families

Nearly 35,000 families in Midland County work hard to provide for their families but don’t make enough to have an emergency fund when the inevitable happens, like a car breaking down, the furnace going out, or unplanned medical bills. For these families, finding a source of balanced meals can be cost-prohibitive. This is where The Bridge helps.
The Bridge, run by volunteers and partners with other local organizations, provides affordable, healthy, high-quality meats, fresh produce, canned and boxed goods, personal care, and paper products to members of need within Midland County. No proof of income is required, giving families the dignity they deserve.
The Bridge has been serving this community for over five years and recently entered a new, larger building on South Saginaw Road and Washington. This unique venue is three times larger, allowing The Bridge to expand on the offerings and the ability to build on serving more than 6,000 families served to date. The $14,700 grant by The Big Give will go towards upgrading electrical equipment to more energy-efficient LED lights to help keep maintenance costs down, and product costs as low as possible for customers.
The Big Give is a giving circle representing more than 100 men from the greater Midland area dedicated to helping local nonprofit agencies. Over $320,000 has been donated to Midland County nonprofits through the organization.
The Midland Area Community Foundation holds the Big Give fund. The Community Foundation has been investing in the community by creating a way for individuals, families, businesses, and organizations to contribute to community well-being for 45 years. The Big Give welcomes new members to increase their ability to support nonprofits in need. To learn more about The Big Give and how you can attend the next Big Give meeting, visit https://midlandfoundation.dctreemarketing.com/the-big-give/.
Midland Area Community Foundation
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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.
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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.
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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
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