zu (Digital Product Agency) is committed to building websites that are accessible, inclusive, and aligned with current accessibility best practices.
During design, we follow the principles of POUR (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust) to guide decision-making and ensure a positive experience for all users. From a design perspective, accessibility considerations include sufficient text and button contrast, clear navigation patterns, redundant navigation cues where appropriate, meaningful system feedback (such as error messages, notifications, and status indicators), responsive layouts that remain readable across devices, and interface components designed for interaction via mouse, keyboard, and assistive technologies. Icons are paired with descriptive labels to improve usability and comprehension.
Our websites are developed on Drupal, whose core platform targets WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance and ATAG 2.0 standards. We maintain this accessibility standard throughout development by incorporating both automated and manual testing practices. Accessibility is evaluated using industry-standard tools, including Google Lighthouse, WAVE, Axe, and RocketValidator, while automated regression testing is integrated into our continuous integration process through tools such as Cypress and Pa11y to help ensure new development does not introduce accessibility issues.
As part of our final quality assurance process before launch, we perform accessibility and performance testing on representative page templates, including:
- Homepage
- Landing Page
- Basic Content Page
-Search Results Page
Google Lighthouse audits are used as a final validation step and are also incorporated into our continuous integration workflow. Our goal is to achieve a Lighthouse score of 90+ for accessibility.
It is important to note that while zu is responsible for ensuring the website’s design, templates, and functionality support WCAG 2.1 AA requirements, ongoing content management can affect accessibility compliance. For example, issues such as duplicate headings, insufficiently descriptive labels, missing alternative text, or images containing large amounts of embedded text may impact accessibility regardless of the underlying platform. As a result, formal certification of full WCAG compliance requires a dedicated accessibility audit that includes both the website implementation and its published content.