Most of us believe we are building accessible websites. We follow the guidelines, run the audits, and check the boxes. But meeting WCAG standards doesn’t guarantee that all users feel welcome and wanted. It’s a vast continuum between a compliant site, a site that works for everyone, and a site that feels intentionally designed for visitors with or without disabilities.
Fieldtrip was selected to design and develop the WordPress website for The Dot Experience, the upcoming public museum of the American Printing House for the Blind (APH). As a museum designed to be the most inclusive attraction in the world, its digital front door had to match that standard. We did not earn the opportunity to work with APH because of a long case study list of highly accessible websites, actually the opposite. We were willing to admit what we did not know and had an eagerness to learn. Through user testing with people who are blind and low-vision, and by navigating the friction among design ambition, development constraints, and competing stakeholder expectations, we now believe inclusion through accessibility is the true goal.
Learn what was wrong with our understanding of accessibility, how user testing changed our decisions, and how we navigated the tension between what the client wanted visually, what website accessibility consultants recommended technically, and what actual users needed. Here are a few of the specific compromises and breakthroughs that will be discussed:
- Managing Client and Consultant Expectations: How we navigated the gap between what the client wanted, what the accessibility consultants recommended, and what user testing actually proved.
- The Neumorphic Braille Header Breakthrough: How we designed visual, braille headers that repeat the H1 text and serve as an educational element for sighted users.
- Semantic Theme Architecture under Pressure: How we configured our WordPress content blocks for a logical tab order and to avoid keyboard traps.
- Lived-Experience QA: How we incorporated feedback from testers within the blind and low-vision community, demonstrating why automated tools only catch a fraction of real-world barriers.
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