Accessible public-services portal rebuild

The client is a UK public-sector body delivering a citizen-facing service that every member of the public has a right to use. Accessibility is not optional here: it is a legal duty and a matter of equal access to public services.

Their existing portal had failed accessibility audit, excluding citizens who depend on assistive technology and exposing the body to compliance risk.

The existing portal failed accessibility audit and, more importantly, excluded citizens who rely on assistive technology to access public services they are entitled to. The failure had real human consequences, not just compliance ones.

Accessibility had been treated as a late-stage checklist, so fixes never held and regressions crept back in. Bolting accessibility on at the end had proven to be a losing strategy.

The department needed a portal that was accessible by design and could pass external audit without a remediation scramble. Durable compliance, not a one-time pass, was the goal.

We rebuilt on an accessible-by-default design system, so correct semantics and focus behaviour came for free rather than being retrofitted. Starting from an accessible foundation is what made the result robust rather than fragile.

Every journey was tested with real screen readers and keyboard-only navigation, not just automated tooling, because automated checks catch only a fraction of real barriers. Human testing found the issues that matter to actual users.

We baked axe checks into CI so regressions are caught before they ship, keeping accessibility a permanent property rather than a one-time pass. The portal cleared external audit at the first attempt as a result.