Background
Over 220,000 court cases move through South Dakota's judicial system every year, and the people navigating that system — working through protection orders, custody disputes, and legal processes they may have never encountered before — deserve a website that doesn't add to their difficulty. The existing SD UJS site was aging out, hard to navigate without a mouse, and not built with the full range of its users in mind.
So when SD UJS partnered with Blend on a full redesign, accessibility wasn't treated as a compliance checkbox to satisfy before launch. It was set as the design goal that everything else had to answer to.
Solution
Blend began with a competitive benchmark of eight comparable state judicial sites, establishing where SD UJS stood and what the field looked like. That research reframed the project brief: accessibility decisions needed to be made at the content model level, the design system level, and the code level — not handed off to QA at the end.
The site was built on Umbraco, the State of South Dakota's preferred CMS, which gave the editorial team the tools to manage content without developer support while ensuring that what they published met accessibility standards. Every path through the site works without a mouse — with full keyboard navigability, clear focus states, and logical heading structure throughout. Contrast ratios were designed to hold up for colorblind users, including a Court Finder map built to work across all color vision combinations. The site was also optimized for low-bandwidth connections, ensuring it's usable regardless of how someone is connecting.
Multilingual support extended the accessibility work further: the site supports 14-plus languages, and hundreds of court forms, procedural guides, and Supreme Court decisions are now classifiable and cross-referenced across languages. When a Spanish form is available alongside an English version, the site flags it — meeting users where they are during situations where clear communication matters most.
Impact
The site launched with a Lighthouse accessibility score of 100, and held that score for the year leading up to publication of this case study. The work was nominated for a 2026 Umbraco Award for Best Accessibility & Security Solution. And the project didn't end at launch — SD UJS continues to work with Blend on ongoing accessibility initiatives, from audits to document analysis, because accessibility at scale is a sustained practice, not a one-time deliverable.
Results
