The Arc of Dallas / Ft. Worth

Delivered a WCAG 2.1 AA Platform, Placing 3rd Out of 27 International Teams

During the Knowbility Accessibility Internet Rally (AIR), 27 international teams set out to build accessible websites for nonprofit clients on a fixed competition timeline. Only 15 teams successfully delivered a finished product.

Serving as Project Manager, Product Manager, and Design Lead, I guided our volunteer cross-functional team through the full project lifecycle to replace The Arc of DFW Area’s legacy website with a custom, accessible WordPress platform.

Role

Project Manager

Product Manager

Design Lead

Year

2020

Deliverables

  • Project Initiation & Planning
  • Project Controlling & Integration

  • Business, Product & Design Requirements

  • Stakeholder Alignment

  • UX Research & Content Audit
  • Information Architecture & Content Strategy
  • Wireframes & UI Specifications

  • Custom WordPress CMS: (WCAG 2.1 Level AA & Section 508)

Final HI Fi arc desktop site

The Mandate: Business Objective & Project Constraints

The Arc is a national organization dedicated to promoting and protecting the human rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Regional chapters sustain this charter locally by providing training, advocacy, and support programs for families and individuals.

Leadership needed to replace their legacy website to provide authoritative, accessible knowledge and services for their community. To keep expectations realistic for the competition window, I drafted an abbreviated Project Charter and scope agreement housed in Basecamp.

When one of the UX Leads stepped back after our initial kickoff, I absorbed the lead UX architecture workload while coordinating our Developer and Junior Designer to keep sprints on schedule.

Because the chapter operated on a tight nonprofit budget with limited internal IT support, our project plan had to deliver an accessible platform that staff could easily maintain after handoff.

Legacy Challenges

  • Content is unorganized and difficult for families to discover.
  • Visual design lacks consistency, hierarchy, and appeal.
  • The legacy CMS is difficult for staff to maintain and update independently.
  • The platform lacks mobile responsiveness and impedes interaction for users with accessibility needs.

Project Planning: Baseline Assessment & Requirements Discovery

To establish our project baseline and set clear boundaries for the competition sprint, I evaluated five core dimensions of the client’s current ecosystem:

01

Stakeholder Alignment & Scope

  • Interviewed the client liaison in 1-on-1 sessions to document the organization’s history, mission, and operational priorities.
  • Established Basecamp as our centralized project hub, where the client uploaded legacy content repositories, resource links, and ad-hoc requests for transparent team visibility.
  • Defined primary project goals around making family support resources and training programs easy to locate online, securing client sign-off on our sprint scope.

02

Audience & Accessibility Needs

  • Assessed user interactions across individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), caregivers, and service coordinators.
  • Identified critical interaction barriers, including cognitive load, short attention spans, and physical motor limitations.
  • Established early requirements for plain language content formatting, predictable navigation patterns, and full assistive technology compatibility.

03

Content Ecosystem

  • Audited a sprawling archive of legacy guides and resource sheets produced by multiple contributors over several years.
  • Identified fragmented external communication channels and an absence of unified editorial standards.
  • There is a deep backlog of content from numerous authors. I documented the requirement to consolidate scattered materials into a centralized, searchable resource directory.

04

Technical Infrastructure

  • Evaluated the legacy CMS, which lacked mobile responsiveness and created significant display issues on small screens.
  • Identified administrative bottlenecks: non-technical staff struggled to update content or maintain site security without developer assistance.
  • Documented transaction drop-off points in existing donation workflows and membership sign-up forms.

05

Visual Design & Hierarchy

  • Assessed the legacy visual presentation, which lacked clear hierarchy, contrast, and engaging layout conventions.
  • Established design goals to create an open, credible visual interface that reflects the authority of The Arc.
  • Planned typographic hierarchy and component styling to guide visitors intuitively toward key services.

Discovery & Strategic Planning

Goals

Content Strategy

Align site messaging with the chapter’s core mission so families can quickly locate support services and get involved.

Information architecture

Restructure navigation and page hierarchies to improve resource findability and search discoverability.

Visual Design

Modernize the interface aesthetic to create an approachable environment that reinforces organizational credibility.

Technology

Deploy a sustainable CMS platform built on accessibility best practices that non-technical staff can maintain independently.

Guiding Principles: Accessibility & Human Factors

Our primary users are individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) and their families.

Every architectural and interface decision must integrate WCAG 2.1 Level AA and Section 508 standards from the ground up.

Designing for visitors who require cognitive and physical accommodations ultimately creates a clearer, more resilient experience for every visitor.

The platform must honor the mission of The Arc by anticipating the urgent questions families face when navigating IDD support systems.

Backed by a dedicated community of advocates, the website serves as a trusted first point of contact.

Above all, The Arc is someone to ask, “How do I get answers?”

Content Audit

The content inventory exists in many different digital formats. 

We used spreadsheets to document, catalog and organize.

We used word clouds, brain writing and association exercises to chunk and group.

Clustering

Arc Content Inventory

Mind mapping & Brainstorming

We looked for common themes in the content backlog.

We identified gaps where content is lacking.

Mind Map

Research: Findings

I analyzed national and regional non-profits that served disabled communities, evaluating how they handled visitor interactions, messaging and branding.

Increase Donations Conversion:
Funding is a important part of maintenance and growth. Reducing friction to collecting donations is a high priority.

Encouraging visitors to join the organization increases visibility and the available resources.

Community Engagement, Training and Advocacy are core mission goals for The Arc.
We will focus on deliberate design decisions that that increase engagement.

Information Architecture

I documented different navigation information architecture models.

The team reviewed the findings, weighing pros/cons of the sample..

We noted page naming conventions we might adopt.

Looking at subject domains.

Parsing the commonly occurring themes for correlation.

Bundling and reducing repetition to produce a durable IA.

Info Architecture Stickies

Card Sorting
(1st draft)

Information Architecture
(2nd draft)

Arc DFW Info Archit Diagram

CMS Selection

Requirements:

We selected WordPress because:

  • Ability to include accessibility in the front end with moderate development investment.
  • Scale-ability for functionality.
  • Scale-ability for content strategy growth.

1. Low cost implementation
2. Low cost maintenance
3. Easy to find contract support
4. Code implementation is manageable
5. Well supported

Design

The Jr. Designer created mockups.

We presented the designs to the customer and solicited feedback, iterating and maturing the designs.

Once the customer approved of the designs we generated high fidelity comps and received final approval.

Arc low fidelity mockup

Responsive, Mobile Design 1st

Arc Mobile View

Menu Annotation Example

“in situations when the parent menu item needs to carry out a function, such as linking to a web page, a separate button can be added to the parent item, to open and close the submenu. This button can also act as a visual indicator for the presence of a submenu.”

Editors: Eric EggertShadi Abou-Zahra Contributors: The Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG)

Final  Implementation

Final HI Fi arc desktop site

Takeaway

The redesigned The Arc of Dallas / Ft. Worth site was submitted for the 2019 Knowbility AIR Rally.

Out of 27 international teams that began the competition and 15 of which submitted a completed submission, our team took 3rd place overall.

I continued to volunteer technical and design support to the organization in my spare time.

I really value learning about the services this organization provides as well as the learning opportunities presented during this project.

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