2025
How I helped the City achieve 91% WCAG 2.1 compliance.
Role
Product Designer
Team Size
3
Platform
Web
Tool Stack
Miro / Microsoft CoPilot / Siteimprove / GovAccess CMS
Opportunity
The Bend community was having trouble finding information on the City’s website, and once they did, the content often lacked clarity or completeness. While the site showed a decent WCAG 2.1 conformance level of ~80%, manual analysis and user feedback painted a different picture.
Automated accessibility scans can flag many specific issues that, in aggregate, can indicate whether a page or site is accessible or not, however they often lack the ability to analyze whether a given page or site is truly useful beyond being technically accessible. For example, a page could include large blocks of text with no logical order or headings to separate the content and improve navigation for screen readers, yet 100% conform to WCAG 2.1 AA.
Research
To get a more complete picture, we conducted user research, including consulting the City of Bend Accessibility Advisory Committee, coordinating a community survey, and installing a prominent feedback collector on the site.
Through this research, we found that out of over 10,000 responses, 55% of users indicated that they could not find what they were looking for.
Users simultaneously found content to be lacking in some instances and overwhelming in others. This resulted in users being unable to get the answers they need or becoming overwhelmed by the presentation, hindering comprehension and task completion.
“Too many words.”
😫
“too much.”
😳
“Is it […] not posted anywhere? Strange…”
🧐
Users expect certain functionalities or pathways that seem to be missing or unclear. As a result, they are unsure how to proceed or cannot find the tools they believe should be available.
Solution
To address these pain points and improve the usability and inclusivity of the website experience for all users, I performed a comprehensive audit of each department’s pages and…
1. I built new service-forward sitemaps.
Sitemapping the Water Service Department’s pages.
2. We rebuilt the information architecture for each page so that the content that remained followed an intuitive flow.
3. We rewrote the page content at an 8th-grade reading level.
Once the information architecture was cleaned up, we did a lot of cutting and pasting and leaned on Microsoft Copilot to help rewrite the content at an 8th-grade reading level to make it more understandable for a majority of the community. We then built the pages, including proper heading structure, alt text, and descriptive links where applicable for accessibility.
Impact
As a result of the information architecture overhaul and content optimization of the site, the City achieved an average of 91% WCAG 2.1 A, AA conformance! This represents a 10% increase from where they were before the project.
Within the development & permitting section of the site, total requests for translation and accessibility accommodations dropped by 52%, from 21 to 10, within the 5 months since the new pages were launched.
We made a concerted effort to rewrite the content at an 8th-grade Flesch-Kincaid reading level to ensure 80% of the population can understand the content. This also improves the effectiveness of page translation tools and the user experience for visitors who utilize screen readers. This early data suggests that the information on the site is now more digestible and easier to navigate by assistive devices, however, further testing is needed to confirm the results.
View the work at bendoregon.gov.