Rehabilitation medicine department replaces 25-year-old site to meet federal accessibility deadline

The challenge

The department's website was roughly 25 years old and had become unmaintainable. The internal UW staff who had built and managed the site had moved on without leaving documentation or instructions. No one remaining knew how to update the platform reliably. For a department serving the disability and rehabilitation community, the accessibility gap was especially consequential: under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, HHS has mandated that organizations with 15 or more employees comply with WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA standards by May 11, 2026. The existing site couldn't meet those requirements, and there was no path to compliance on the old infrastructure.

The approach

Cloverleaf deployed a Foundation-tier platform configured for the department's complex content landscape: four degree programs including PhD in Rehabilitation Science, Doctor of Physical Therapy, Master of Occupational Therapy, and Master of Prosthetics & Orthotics, plus residency and fellowship programs, a searchable faculty directory with automated PubMed publication listings for each faculty member, news and events, patient care resources, and community engagement content. Accessibility compliance was built into every component, with the site scoring 98% on UW's internal WCAG compliance tools, well ahead of the federal deadline. The content management layer was designed so department staff could publish and maintain content directly, eliminating the dependency on any single technical person.

The results