Performant and accessible: How we achieved near-perfect scores on BC Unclaimed’s website
Problem
Our planned design for BC Unclaimed’s new website was beautiful and feature-rich. But how would we make it fast? And how would we make it accessible to people using assistive technology?
Our approach
Headless content management with Contentful
Jamstack development on NextJS
Static pre-rendered pages
Accessibility audit
Blind user testing
Solution
Fast websites are a pleasure to use, inspiring confidence in visitors. We relied on a Jamstack development approach to ensure blistering performance (try the site now, and tell me if it’s not one of the fastest websites you’ve used!).
Despite the complexity of the home page, it achieves near-perfect scores on Performance, Accessibility, and Best Practices, as measured by Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
It was equally important to ensure everyone can use BC Unclaimed’s website, including people that rely on screenreaders or other assistive technologies. We used a 3-step process to ensure the website was accessible:
Used automated testing tools to audit our site until we had a perfect 100% accessibility score
Had an accessibility expert manually audit the site
Worked with the Canadian National Institute of the Blind to observe the actual experience of a blind user on our website
“I’d go with an 8 [out of 10]. I think it’s fairly strong overall… I didn’t encounter any hard barriers… Pat yourself on the back. Accessibility is a journey… Nobody’s perfect, no software is perfect, and we don’t expect accessibility to be perfect. It’s just important to keep moving forward.” — Blind user feedback from live user testing, prior to final accessibility fixes.
Read next case study in this series on BC Unclaimed: