In short
Starting point: an old PHP site with a badly outdated front end.
Digital accessibility (WCAG) as a formal requirement, not an add-on to scope.
A limited budget alongside higher formal requirements.
Two weeks from design to launch — our fastest full delivery.
The result: more traffic and a site that meets the applicable standards.
The challenge
The association had a site built on PHP, with a front end old enough that it no longer met either user expectations or formal requirements.
The second of those mattered more. Organisations carrying out public tasks are bound by digital accessibility requirements — the site has to be usable by people relying on screen readers, navigating by keyboard, or needing adequate contrast. That is not a matter of taste or goodwill, but a condition to be met.
Constraints
Digital accessibility requirements. Not skippable and not deferrable.
A limited budget. As on most non-profit projects — formal requirements higher than on commercial work, funds smaller.
The deadline was the least of the problems here — the client gave us more time than we needed.
The decision: accessibility from the first wireframe
Digital accessibility can be approached two ways: design the site around it from the start, or build normally and fix things after an audit.
The second looks cheaper and almost always ends up costing more. Contrast, focus order, heading structure and keyboard handling are not things you add at the end — they follow from how the components are built. Fixing them afterwards means reworking the interface, not adding attributes.
On a limited budget that choice mattered twice over: designing for the requirements straight away was the only option that fit the funds.
The result
The site meets the accessibility requirements binding on the organisation, and looks like a site from this decade rather than the previous one.
After launch traffic increased — partly because a modern, faster, correctly built site is judged better by search engines, and partly because the old front end put off some visitors before they reached the content.
The whole thing took two weeks.
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