Rebuilding for Clarity, Compliance, and Care
How 118Group helped Children’s Cove turn a UX audit and a hard accessibility deadline into a clearer, calmer, WCAG 2.1 AA compliant website.
Project Details.
Services Provided.
UX Research & Discovery
Information Architecture
Content Strategy & UX Writing
Website Design & Development
Accessibility Compliance (WCAG 2.1 AA)
Third-Party Accessibility Audit Coordination
Staff Training & Handoff
The Client.
Children’s Cove is the Cape & Islands Child Advocacy Center — the first point of contact in Barnstable County for cases involving crimes against children.
The team coordinates forensic interviews, supports families through investigations, and trains community partners across law enforcement, healthcare, education, and child protective services.
It’s serious, sensitive work. And for many of the people who land on its website — a parent who just got a call from an investigator, a teacher trying to figure out whether to make a referral, a clinician confirming a process — those first few seconds on the page can shape what they do next.
The Challenge.
Two pressures arrived at the same time.
The first was a hard deadline. The Children’s Cove website needed to meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards by April 24, 2026.
The second was that the existing website wasn’t working well for its visitors, accessibility aside. Years of additions had produced 13 to 18 unique page templates, many inconsistent patterns, and dense content that visitors didn’t read. An accessibility-focused update would have brought the site in to AA compliance and solved any legal problems, but would have left every other user experience problem in place.
Before recommending a rebuild scope, 118Group conducted a UX audit.
An accessibility-focused update would have brought the site in to AA compliance and solved any legal problems, but would have left every other user experience problem in place.”
What the Audit Revealed.
The UX audit included a combined review of website traffic, existing content, user journeys, and community survey results.
Parents came to the site to understand, not to escape.
The most-visited pages were all About- and contact-oriented. The “Get Help” page was one of the least-visited on the site.
Visitors thought in tasks, not identities.
The “Accessing Services” page saw roughly twice the traffic of the “Parents & Caregivers” section.
The site asked too much of anxious caregivers.
Pages were dense, written above an eighth-grade reading level, and scattered process information across multiple navigation tabs.
The community confirmed it.
Survey respondents reported difficulty finding what happens during a visit and requested a clearer main menu and less text.
The findings pointed in one direction: Visitors needed a website that was easier to understand, navigate, and use both visually and when using accessibility tools.
Our Focus.
From the start, the project balanced a fixed deadline, a sensitive subject matter, and a clear set of audience needs surfaced by the audit. The work centered on three objectives:
Rebuild around how visitors actually think.
Replace identity-based navigation with pathways surfaced by community survey findings. Consolidate scattered process content into a single “What to Expect” hub.
Build accessibility in from the start, don’t bolt it on as an afterthought.
Design and develop every page to WCAG 2.1 AA standards from the ground up — semantic markup, keyboard navigation, screen reader support, accessible forms, and color contrast baked into the design system.
Ship a calmer, more human experience.
Approach the visual design and content with the visitor’s emotional state in mind: calm color palettes; plain language; and short, scannable groupings of text.
The Highlights.
Task-Oriented
Pathways on the
Homepage
The new homepage routes visitors down three clear pathways — What to Expect, Get Involved, and Education & Training — sequenced by what the audit and analytics said visitors were actually looking for. Get Help remains prominent but is treated as a clear utility rather than the primary CTA.
Accessibility
Designed In
Pierce Cote led the front-end design with WCAG 2.1 AA requirements as a baked-in constraint from the first mockup — accessible color palette, type scale, focus states, and component patterns established before any page-level design work began. No widget. A third-party audit verified the result.
A Clearer “What to Expect” Page
Parents and caregivers had been forced to piece together their visit from multiple navigation tabs. The new What to Expect page consolidates the journey in plain-language, scannable sections written at the appropriate reading level. Imagery and tone tuned for a parent in a difficult moment, not an industry conference.
From 18 Templates
Down to 5
The legacy site’s sprawling template library was the single biggest reason a retrofit would have been so expensive. The rebuild collapses that to a focused set of purpose-built pages — each treated as its own template and independently audited for accessibility. The team now has a site they can maintain.
Key Outcomes.
Verified accessibility, a research-backed structure, a calmer experience for visitors in difficult moments, and a site the team can actually maintain.
WCAG 2.1 AA Compliant at Launch
The site passed third-party accessibility validation and launched ahead of the April 2026 deadline. Accessibility was verified, not assumed.
Information Architecture Backed by Research
Every navigation decision is traceable to a finding in the UX audit — analytics, journey maps, or community survey responses. The site is structured for the people who actually use it.
A More Human Experience in Difficult Moments
Plain-language content, calmer visual treatments, and a “What to Expect” hub built around the parent journey reduce cognitive load for visitors arriving anxious or in a hurry.
A Site Children’s Cove Can Maintain
A focused page set on WordPress, with clear templates and a documented handoff, gives the internal team a manageable site to update and grow — replacing a legacy structure that had become unmaintainable.
Interested in Results Like These?
If your organization is navigating accessibility requirements, we can help — from initial scoping through third-party audit, remediation, and documentation.