PNC Bank Acces­si­bil­i­ty Audit + Update

How does a site built in 2018 stand up to the acces­si­bil­i­ty expec­ta­tions of today?

Deutsch asked us that very ques­tion regard­ing one of their clients, PNC Bank. We cre­at­ed a detailed acces­si­bil­i­ty audit of the PNC Real Estate News­feed and a list of sug­gest­ed fix­es. After review­ing the audit, they liked what we pro­posed, and they asked us to fix the site’s issues. 

The Word­Press theme lacked doc­u­men­ta­tion, and, giv­en that it was built in 2018, it lacked a mod­ern build process. We start­ed by cre­at­ing a Vite build sys­tem for the theme to allow us to fix the site. The new build sys­tem also makes future updates eas­i­er. When we revised tem­plates, we added doc­u­men­ta­tion along the way. 

One piece of the site that repeat­ed­ly failed acces­si­bil­i­ty tests was the site’s share drop­down. Instead of fix­ing the drop-down in mul­ti­ple places through­out the theme, we built a new web com­po­nent to encap­su­late the func­tion­al­i­ty and styling options into a sim­ple, reusable tag. If you’re inter­est­ed in web com­po­nents, check out the source code and the demo page for the com­po­nent.

When we fin­ished our work, the client received an updat­ed theme they quick­ly dropped into their exist­ing site. Now, the site is acces­si­ble to a much wider audi­ence.