MGE Energy Accessibility

Goal:
Bring the website’s accessibility score (in SiteImprove) from 68% → 95%+, across all 5 pillars (WCAG A, WCAG AA, WCAG AAA, Best Practices, ARIA)

My Role:
UX Designer & Accessibility Designer

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Timeline:
9 Months

Areas of Focus:
Accessibility (WCAG A, WCAG AA, WCAG AAA, ARIA, Best Practices)

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The Problem

  • The MGE Energy site scored ~68% in accessibility via SiteImprove, indicating pervasive issues across contrast, semantic markup, ARIA attributes, keyboard navigation, etc.
  • These accessibility gaps posed legal risks, poor experience for users with disabilities, and a barrier to equal access.
  • The challenge: systematically improve every pillar of accessibility while maintaining the site’s brand, content, and design integrity.
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Approach

  • Conducted full accessibility audit using SiteImprove and manual testing.
  • Prioritized fixes by severity and impact (critical, high, medium).
  • Updated markup/semantics (headers, alt text, landmark roles, ARIA labels) across templates and components.
  • Adjusted visual design to meet contrast thresholds, reworked color usage, typography, and focus states.
  • Validated changes iteratively via automated tests & manual checks.

Findings

  • Baseline 68% improved to 95%+ post-fixes (in SiteImprove) across all five pillars.
  • Large number of contrast failures (background/text combinations) required palette adjustment and CSS refactoring.
  • Some template pages had missing alt text or improper semantic headings, improved across site.
  • Multiple components lacked appropriate ARIA roles/attributes (e.g. form controls, alerts, menus).

Outcome & Impact

  • Achieved SiteImprove accessibility score >95%, demonstrating strong compliance across WCAG A, WCAG AA, WCAG AAA, ARIA, and best practices.
  • The site is now more inclusive to users with disabilities, lowering legal and reputational risk.
  • The effort strengthened the maintainability of the site’s codebase: future pages added will follow accessibility standards by default.
  • Internal stakeholders (dev, content) now have a clear accessibility baseline and guidelines to follow.

Reflection

This work reinforced how accessibility is not just a “checkbox” but a design lens—small changes in markup, focus states, and semantics can significantly change user experience for those with disabilities. In future iterations, I’d like to integrate user testing with participants using assistive technologies to validate real-world experience beyond tool scores.

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