A11y Consulting Site

The Problem

EdTech platforms are built to educate, but many of them exclude the learners who need them most. One in five Americans lives with a disability, yet most educational software fails basic accessibility standards — unlabeled forms, missing heading hierarchy, no keyboard navigation, insufficient contrast. Over 4,000 ADA lawsuits were filed in 2024, and Title II compliance is now tied to federal education funding. The need is urgent, but many EdTech teams do not know where to start or what to fix first.

I wanted to bridge that gap: take my 7 years of classroom experience working directly with disabled students and translate it into actionable, approachable accessibility consulting that meets EdTech teams where they are.

Defining the Offering

I structured the consulting services around a simple principle: meet people at their level of readiness. Not every team is ready for a full audit, but every team can benefit from knowing where they stand.

Design Process

I prioritized the free deliverables first — the scorecard and quick wins guide — because they needed to be strong enough to stand on their own as demonstrations of expertise before any paid service made sense.

Visual Identity

I chose a warm, earthy palette — cream backgrounds, terracotta accents, deep brown text — to feel approachable and human rather than clinical or corporate. EdTech teams are often overwhelmed by accessibility jargon; the visual tone needed to say "I'll help you understand this" rather than "you're doing it wrong." Typography pairs DM Serif Display for headings (warmth, authority) with Source Sans 3 for body text (clarity, readability).

Content Strategy

The homepage opens with four data points — disability statistics, lawsuit numbers, user retention rates, and federal funding requirements — to establish urgency without being alarmist. The about section leads with classroom experience, not certifications, because empathy is the differentiator. Services are presented as tiers rather than a single price, so potential clients can self-select based on their readiness and budget.

Information Architecture

The site is intentionally small: a homepage with everything a potential client needs to evaluate, decide, and reach out, plus dedicated pages for the guide, scorecard, and accessibility statement. No blog, no pricing calculator, no complexity — just a clear path from "I need help" to "here's how to get it."

Interactive Features

The scorecard preview section uses an image carousel with keyboard navigation (arrow keys), dot pagination, and a lightbox for full-size viewing. The contact form integrates with Web3Forms for serverless submission. Both features were built with accessibility as a hard requirement: focus trapping in the lightbox, Escape to close, ARIA attributes on all controls.

The Scorecard

The accessibility scorecard is the centerpiece of the consulting offering. It evaluates a single page against 10 criteria drawn directly from WCAG 2.1, each scored out of 20 points with a severity rating and actionable recommendation. The goal was to create something useful enough that a team could act on it immediately, and specific enough that they would trust the expertise behind it.

I chose these 10 criteria because they cover the issues I encountered most often in my years working with disabled students: unlabeled controls that screen readers skip, contrast too low for students with low vision, keyboard traps that lock out switch users. Every criterion maps to a specific WCAG success criterion so the report doubles as a compliance reference.

The Guide

The "5 Accessibility Quick Wins for EdTech Platforms" guide serves two purposes: it gives potential clients immediate value at no cost, and it demonstrates the kind of clear, actionable thinking they would get from a paid engagement. Each of the five wins was chosen because it has an outsized impact relative to its implementation effort — the kind of fix a developer can ship in an afternoon that meaningfully improves the experience for disabled users.

The guide is available both as a dedicated web page (fully accessible, naturally) and as a downloadable PDF. I designed it with the same warm visual identity as the main site so it reads as a cohesive extension of the brand rather than a generic freebie.

Accessibility

An accessibility consulting site that fails its own standards would be career-ending. Every element was built and tested to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, with a published accessibility statement inviting users to report barriers.

The site includes a full accessibility statement detailing conformance claims, testing methods, known limitations, and a feedback process with a two-business-day response commitment. If a consultant is going to ask clients to take accessibility seriously, they need to see that seriousness modeled.

Outcomes

The site launched with a complete consulting offering — from free tools to paid tiers — built on a foundation that practices what it preaches.

What I Learned

This project forced me to think about accessibility not just as a design skill but as a service I could package and deliver. Writing the scorecard criteria taught me to be precise about what I was actually evaluating and why — vague feedback like "improve your contrast" is useless to a developer, but "this button's 2.8:1 ratio fails WCAG SC 1.4.3; change the background from #B85042 to #8B3A30 for 4.6:1" is something they can ship in five minutes. Building the consulting site itself reinforced that accessibility is a design constraint like any other — it does not limit creativity, it focuses it. The warm, approachable visual identity I landed on is proof that WCAG compliance and distinctive design are not in tension. Finally, I learned that the hardest part of consulting is not the technical work but the communication: framing accessibility as an opportunity to serve more learners rather than a compliance burden to endure.

Next Steps