2025
How I helped the City achieve 91% WCAG 2.1 compliance.
Note: This case study describes work performed in my professional role at the City of Bend. This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by the City.Role
UX Designer
Team Size
3
Platform
Web
Tool Stack
Miro / Microsoft Copilot / Siteimprove / GovAccess
CONTEXT & CHALLENGE
A city growing faster than its digital infrastructure
As Bend's population has grown, so has residents' expectations for what a city website should do. More and more people turn to bendoregon.gov to apply for permits, pay utilities, access services, and get answers—tasks that once required a phone call or an in-person visit.
With hundreds of pages managed across departments by non-technical staff, the site had accumulated content that was technically present but not always actionable. The City's automated WCAG 2.1 scan showed a solid ~80% conformance rate, but automated scans can only measure so much. A page can pass every technical check and still present residents with walls of unstructured text, no logical heading hierarchy for screen readers to navigate, or pathways that lead nowhere.
This gap between technical compliance and real-world usability is exactly where UX belongs. The City made a proactive investment in understanding that gap…and closing it.
RESEARCH
Understanding the gap between compliance and usability
To build a clear and defensible picture of the user experience, I coordinated research across three channels: consulting the City of Bend Accessibility Advisory Committee for qualitative, lived-experience perspectives; designing and deploying a community survey; and installing a prominent on-site feedback collector to capture real-time input from active users.
Over 10,000 responses later, three themes emerged consistently — not as indictments of any department's work, but as a signal that the site had outgrown its original structure:
Theme 1
Discoverability
55% of users reported being unable to find what they were looking for. Information existed, but wasn't organized around how community members think about their needs.
Theme 2
Comprehension
Content that was found was often hard to act on. This was primarily due to large blocks of text without clear structure and lacking the context needed to take a next step.
Theme 1
Missing pathways
When community members couldn't find a logical next step—expected tools or forms that weren't surfaced—they abandoned the site or called the City directly, adding to staff workload.
These findings reflected the challenge of maintaining hundreds of pages without dedicated UX support, not a failure of any department. This project was an opportunity to build that foundation.
The Process
We approached this as a content strategy and information architecture problem first, and a compliance exercise second. Here's how the work broke down and what I personally owned at each stage.
Audit & prioritization
MY LEAD
I conducted a comprehensive page-by-page audit across every department's web presence, evaluating each page for content clarity, heading structure, link quality, and reading level.
Sitemapping & information architecture
MY LEAD
For each department, I built new sitemaps, organizing content around what community members are trying to do, not how the City is organized internally. This required building trust with department stakeholders and navigating the tension between institutional habits and user needs.
Content rewrite & page build
TEAM EFFORT
Working with department stakeholders and leveraging Microsoft Copilot as a drafting accelerant, the team rewrote page content to a target 8th-grade Flesch-Kincaid reading level.
The Work
With the audit complete and the IA framework in place, the work shifted to rebuilding. Every page followed the same sequence: map what exists, define what should exist, restructure, rewrite, build, and QA.
Where pages previously mixed procedural steps, policy background, and contact info in undifferentiated blocks of text, the rebuilt pages use deliberate heading hierarchy to give screen readers a navigable structure—and give all users a clear sense of what's on the page before they read it.
Rewriting to an 8th-grade reading level wasn't about simplifying civic information. It was about making it equitable: usable for a broader share of the population, more effective with translation tools, and easier to navigate with assistive technology.
IMPACT
Early results are pointing in the right direction
91%
Average WCAG 2.1 A/AA conformance — a 10-point gain from the project's starting point
52%
Drop in accommodation requests via the permit counter (from 21 to 10 within 5 months)
The 52% reduction in accommodation requests is the metric I'm most proud of, because it reflects an actual change in community experience, not just a score on a dashboard. When community members can find and understand what they need without calling City staff, that's the goal made real.
The sample size for accommodation requests is small, and further data collection is underway. These results are directionally promising but should be interpreted cautiously until more data is available.
Lessons Learned
Involve department staff earlier. The sitemapping sessions were valuable, but earlier co-design with staff would have reduced revision cycles. People are more invested in structures they helped build.
Treat content governance as a design deliverable. Without ongoing guidance for staff on how to maintain the new structure, content drift is inevitable. I'd advocate for a content style guide as a formal project output next time.
The compliance score is a proxy, not the goal. 91% conformance is meaningful, but the 52% drop in accommodation requests is the metric that captures why any of this matters. Reframing success around resident outcomes from the start would have sharpened our KPIs throughout the project.