Blend redesigned the South Dakota Unified Judicial System website with WCAG 2.2 AA compliance, multilingual support, and a Lighthouse accessibility score of 100.
Over 220,000 court cases move through South Dakota's judicial system every year, and those cases involve and affect hundreds of thousands of people — people who are navigating difficult situations, from protection orders to custody disputes, often for the first time and almost certainly while under stress.
So, when Blend began designing and building a new site for the South Dakota Unified Judicial System, we all understood the importance of being accessible to everyone — to build an accessible site that asked as little of the people using it as possible.
How accessibility shaped every design decision.
During discovery, Blend benchmarked SD UJS against eight comparable state judicial sites to find gaps and gain insight into the space. Because the site was aging out, South Dakota’s UJS site came in near the bottom in terms of overall accessibility scores, with a 74 overall through Lighthouse scanning. This research helped reframe the entire design brief: accessibility wasn't a requirement to satisfy at the end of the project, but a design goal from day one.
That meant decisions made in the content model, the design system, and the code all had to hold up before QA ever ran a scan.
Cut now to the live site, where the standard accessibility measures are present and easy to understand. Every path through the site works without a mouse — with full keyboard navigability, clear focus states, and logical structure throughout — while also being optimized for low bandwidth, working for anyone regardless of their connection.
