PNC Bank — Accessibility Audit

An accessibility audit and remediation for the PNC Real Estate Newsfeed, where the scope grew beyond the original assessment once I started digging into the site.
- Role: Contractor via Deutsch (agency of record) — audit, remediation, platform updates
- Stack: WordPress, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- Client: PNC Bank / Deutsch
The Problem
Deutsch brought me in to address specific accessibility issues their team had already identified on the PNC Real Estate Newsfeed WordPress site. When I started reviewing the site, I found a broader set of problems that the initial assessment had missed.
Rather than just fixing the flagged items, I proposed a comprehensive audit — documenting every accessibility issue across the site so we could address them systematically instead of playing whack-a-mole.
What I did
I audited the full site, cataloged every accessibility issue, and worked with the agency to prioritize and fix them. The key constraint was preserving the site’s visual identity throughout — the goal was compliance without a redesign.
While I was in there, I also addressed a backlog of pending WordPress core and plugin updates and resolved server-side issues that had been left unattended. The kind of work that accumulates when a site doesn’t have a dedicated developer watching it.
Why it matters
Accessibility work is often treated as a checklist — fix what’s flagged and move on. This project was a case where going beyond the original scope was the right call. Fixing only the known issues would have left the site partially compliant, which isn’t really compliant at all.