Wevise · Website redesign 2026
A WCAG 2.1 AA and mobile/tablet review of all 20 redesign drafts, the header and footer templates, and the newsletter form — run against the pages themselves, not against the plan.
Two questions were asked. Both now have real answers.
Every one of the 20 drafts was rendered at 375px and 768px and measured for horizontal overflow. All 20 fit their viewport at both widths, with no sideways scrolling and no content pushed off-screen.
This corrected an earlier assumption of ours. An initial pass over the page settings flagged Industry Insights, Contact Us and Resources as thin on mobile configuration and therefore risky. Rendered, all three are clean — the page builder's defaults handle them. The settings were a poor predictor; the rendered test is the one that counts.
Text colour, not layout, is where the redesign was failing. Nine separate colour problems were measured and fixed today, including two places where text was effectively invisible — the homepage cohort countdown and a heading on Our Stories.
The four fixes from the August 7 assessment all held. These are new instances, most of them introduced after that review.
Each verified against the page data and re-measured in a browser after the change.
The cohort countdown on the homepage rendered dark green text on a dark teal panel. Not low contrast — invisible. The design intended dark text on a light band, but the widget supplies its own dark background, so the two collided.
Digits and labels are now white on that panel.
Homepage · needs 4.5:1
On Our Stories, this heading pulled a near-white colour from a shared theme setting used elsewhere for light text on dark bands. On a pale section it disappeared. The heading is now navy, and the line beneath it takes the standard body colour.
Our Stories · needs 3:1 at this size
The lighter brand blue measures 4.11:1 on white — under the 4.5:1 needed for normal-size text. It was being used for the homepage role-card labels and their four links, and for the header's menu hover and active states.
Those are now the accessible blue already in the design system. Deliberately left alone: the same blue on icons and on the large gift-tier figures, where the requirement is 3:1 and it passes comfortably. A blanket swap would have changed artwork that was never failing.
Homepage · header template · 10 instances
Two muted greys were carrying real content: testimonial attributions on the homepage and Become a Mentor, the nine article dates on Our Stories, and the partner separators on the four co-brand pages. Both are now the accessible grey introduced in August.
8 pages · 8 instances
Contact Us, Volunteer and Coaching Corner had no h1 anywhere. Their titles looked like headings but were not marked as one, so screen readers and search engines had no page title to anchor on. Each hero title is now the page's main heading.
The four impact figures — 32, 28, 100% and 78.7% — were each marked as headings, so anyone navigating by heading heard a list reading "32, 28, 100%, 78.7%". The countdown label was a heading too, and the story and newsletter sections sat a level too deep.
Figures and the countdown label are now plain text; the two section titles moved up a level. The homepage outline now runs cleanly from the page title down with no skipped levels.
The small uppercase labels above the testimonials — Mentee story, The mentor, The mentee, Mentor spotlight — were marked as sixth-level headings. The August 7 review had specifically converted labels like these to plain text; the testimonial blocks added on August 20 reintroduced the pattern. Five labels, now plain text again with no visual change.
Homepage · Become a Mentor · Chicago TechPath
One leadership photograph on Our Team had no alternative text, in the image itself or in the media library, so it would have reached screen readers as an unlabelled image. That listing has since been removed from the page at your direction, which resolves it.
The badge under Impact & outcomes sat just under the threshold at 11px. It inherited its styling from the old "coming soon" badge, so the same flaw would have shipped either way. Now darker and a point larger.
Donate · Donate — Chicago TechPath
Four items remain. None block the September 1 date, but two want a decision.
Two links in the homepage mentee story — the Ada Developers Academy credit and "read her full story" — measure 2.93:1. They take their colour from a site-wide theme setting rather than from the page, so fixing them properly means changing that setting for the whole site, including pages outside this launch.
Worth doing, but it is a site-wide change rather than a page edit, and should be made deliberately.
The same class of problem fixed on the homepage still exists on Get Involved, Get Mentorship, Become a Mentor, Our Team and both Donate pages — card titles sitting two levels below their section instead of one. Less severe than the homepage case, and each page needs a judgement call about which elements should be headings at all.
386 of 431 images in the library have no alternative text. Most never appear on the new site — the large hero photographs are background images and are correctly treated as decorative — so the launch exposure is small. Worth a cleanup pass on the images the new site actually uses.
Several standalone text links measure 23 pixels tall against a 24-pixel minimum. A line-height adjustment fixes the set. The footer social icons at 37px clear the minimum and fall short only of the more generous 44-pixel comfort target.
Two checks are genuinely blocked until launch day, not deferred by choice.
Both live in the new header and footer. Those templates are not switched on until step 5 of the cutover, so the draft pages currently render inside the old header and footer. Testing them before that would measure the wrong thing.
Keyboard focus visibility has been carried since the August 7 review for the same reason. Both should be the first checks run once the new shell goes live.
Method matters here, because the first attempt produced a clean result that was wrong.
| Check | Method | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Horizontal overflow | Each page rendered in a fixed-width frame at 375px and 768px, every element measured against the viewport edge | 20 pages |
| Colour contrast | Computed from rendered colours against the effective background, per WCAG relative luminance | 20 pages |
| Heading structure | Full heading outline read from the rendered document | 20 pages |
| Alternative text | Rendered images plus the underlying page data and media library | 20 pages + library |
| Target size | Measured bounding boxes of every link and button | 20 pages |
The first pass reported no problems at all — and it was wrong. A quirk in how the query layer handled quotation marks meant every check silently matched nothing and returned a clean result across all 20 pages.
It was caught by running a control check that was known to fail; when that also came back clean, the method was the problem, not the pages. Every result was then re-run using a different technique. A clean audit that checked nothing is more dangerous than no audit, so this is written down in the project notes rather than quietly corrected.
Eleven days out.
Layout is sound on phones and tablets, and the accessibility failures that would have been visible to a real user — invisible countdown, invisible heading, low-contrast labels and links — are fixed and re-verified. What remains is one site-wide colour decision, a tidy-up of heading structure on six pages, and two checks that have to wait for the new shell.
The August 2026 WCAG 2.1 AA position holds, and the pages added since have now been brought up to it.