ADA Remediation + Technical SEO · Florida Panhandle
First Judicial Circuit of Florida — ADA Remediation
ADA remediation for the First Judicial Circuit Court of Florida (Escambia, Okaloosa, Santa Rosa, and Walton counties). WAVE score improved from 7.6 to 9.8/10 with zero WAVE errors and zero downtime on the live Gatsby + Sanity site.
First Judicial Circuit of Florida · Visit live site
Challenge
The First Judicial Circuit serves four Florida counties — Escambia, Okaloosa, Santa Rosa, and Walton — with judges, clerks, attorneys, jurors, and the public depending on the site for essential court information. Accessibility barriers were blocking real people from critical content, and remediation had to happen without taking the circuit offline.
Approach
We audited with WAVE and manual WCAG review on the Gatsby site (originally migrated from Drupal, with custom Algolia header search already in place), prioritized blocking issues, then remediated templates and content patterns systematically — keeping the site live the entire time. Technical SEO cleanup rode along with the accessibility work.
Outcome
WAVE moved from 7.6 to 9.8/10 with zero WAVE errors and zero downtime. The First Judicial Circuit site at firstjudicialcircuit.org now meets a much higher accessibility baseline for public access to justice information.
Public access to justice, four counties
The First Judicial Circuit is one of 20 judicial circuits in Florida. It serves Escambia, Okaloosa, Santa Rosa, and Walton counties. Court websites are not marketing sites — they are how citizens find dockets, locations, forms, and announcements. Accessibility debt here is a civic problem, not a cosmetic one.
ADA remediation without downtime
We treated remediation as continuous delivery on the live Gatsby + Sanity site: audit, prioritize, fix templates, re-test. Releases stayed coordinated so filers and the public never lost access while scores and real-world usability improved.
Results
WAVE 9.8/10, zero WAVE errors, zero downtime. Technical SEO issues common to older government templates were cleaned up in the same pass. See the live circuit site at firstjudicialcircuit.org.
Related: document pipeline
Alongside the public site work, we built Pith so the circuit can convert thousands of legacy court PDFs into structured Sanity data — still in active use.
Read that engagement: Court PDFs to Sanity with Pith.
Related: platform migration + search
Years earlier we migrated the circuit from Drupal to Gatsby and built custom Algolia header modal search. Read that case study.