Introduction

TRSL’s website is a mission-critical resource for active teachers, retirees, and employers across Louisiana. Over multiple engagements we rebuilt and refined the site; the most recent effort focused on removing accessibility barriers and creating a maintainable process so the site serves all members reliably. (Site reference).  

The Website Build: A Standards-First Overhaul

Summary:
Modernize the site’s front-end and editorial workflows so accessibility is baked in, not bolted on.

Challenge:
TRSL had a large, content-heavy site with interactive tools and documents. Accessibility gaps across markup, forms, media, and interactive components increased legal and user-experience risk as federal guidance and technical standards evolved. Recent federal action emphasizes WCAG 2.1 AA as the target for state and local government sites, making a standards-based remediation essential.  

Approach:
We treated the engagement as both engineering and governance: rewrite templates and components to produce semantic, accessible HTML; remediate documents and media; and create authoring processes so new content meets accessibility criteria at publication.

Implementation highlights

• Performed a complete accessibility audit combining automated scans with manual keyboard and screen-reader testing to find edge cases that tools miss.  
• Rebuilt core UI templates (forms, navigation, interactive widgets) to ensure proper focus order, ARIA usage only where necessary, and fully labeled form controls.
• Remediated PDFs and media (alt text, captions, transcripts) and introduced an authoring checklist to stop regressions at source.
• Added regression tests and an accessibility release checklist so every change is validated before deployment.

Results

‍Delivered a production site aligned with current accessibility expectations and a repeatable editorial workflow that enforces accessibility on publishing. Reduced maintenance overhead and compliance risk by moving enforcement into the content lifecycle rather than treating accessibility as a periodic fix.

Member Tools & Transactions: Accessibility in Action

Context & challenge:

Member-facing tools (benefit calculators, forms, member resources) must be both usable and discoverable for a wide range of users, including assistive-technology users.

What we delivered

• Reorganized member resources into task-oriented landing pages so common actions (apply, estimate, download forms) are obvious and reachable without deep navigation.
• Ensured interactive tools operate with keyboard-only flows and are screen-reader friendly; added semantic markup that improves both accessibility and indexability.

Results

• Improved usability for members with disabilities and reduced support friction for routine tasks, while preserving the site’s search visibility.

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