NEAMB
Accessibility Refactor Brings WCAG 2.1 AA Compliance and Cuts Maintenance Overhead in Half
The National Education Association Member Benefits (NEAMB), a subsidiary of the National Education Association (NEA), offers discounts and benefits on travel, insurance, finance, and more for teachers.
- Services
- Accessibility Refactor
- Technologies
- Semantic HTML5
- Modern Native CSS
- Vanilla JavaScript
Oshyn makes critical NEAMB services accessible to educators of all capabilities.
The Challenge
More than one in four U.S. adults lives with some form of disability. Since NEAMB serves three million educators who use its site to manage benefits, retirement accounts, and personal finances, roughly 750,000 members fall into that group. For one of them, checking a retirement balance means tabbing through the page with a screen reader and waiting to find out whether the number is read aloud at all, while others use keyboard input only. For these members, an accessible site isn't simply a better experience but often the only way they can complete the task at all.
Unfortunately, NEAMB's website had fallen behind current accessibility standards. Large parts of the site lacked proper ARIA attributes and keyboard navigation, leaving screen reader and keyboard-only users unable to complete essential tasks. Under WCAG 2.1 Level AA and ADA regulations, this situation created the risk of legal notices and fines. It also widened the gap between NEAMB's digital experience and its commitment to diversity and inclusion.
Additionally, years of incremental updates had left the site's underlying structure bloated and hard to work with. The desktop and mobile experiences ran on separate, duplicated versions of the site, doubling the maintenance effort and making the accessibility gaps even harder to close. The technology powering the site had also aged, slowing development and introducing security risks. NEAMB needed help to solve these maintenance and accessibility issues and turned to Oshyn for assistance.
The Solution
NEAMB selected Oshyn for its extensive expertise in front-end engineering and web accessibility. Using a holistic technical strategy, Oshyn showed how they could rebuild complex, high-traffic components in clean, accessible code without compromising performance or design integrity.
Rather than patching individual errors, Oshyn audited every template, component, and user flow, and then rebuilt the frontend to give screen readers a clear, logical navigation structure. They also replaced outdated code with a faster, more consistent design system across the site.
The rebuild focused on the components that touch every page, specifically the global header and footer, content cards, and interactive carousels. Headers and footers now navigate reliably across devices, cards are easier to interact with, and carousels include keyboard controls and screen reader announcements that explain what's changed as the content moves.
Now NEAMB has a lighter, more responsive codebase that gives the team direct control over accessibility going forward and is organized so future updates can ship without breaking what's already working.
The Outcome
Oshyn's refactor brought NEAMB's core templates and components into compliance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The change removed the major blockers that had kept screen reader users, keyboard-only users, and low-vision users from completing essential tasks like checking a balance or filing a claim.
The rebuild also made the site lighter, faster, and easier to maintain. Removing outdated tooling improved load times and performance across the board, and desktop and mobile now run on one unified codebase instead of two separate versions, cutting front-end maintenance overhead by roughly 50%. The technology powering the site has also been modernized, replacing an aging, higher-risk build pipeline with a current, secure foundation for future development.
For the educators who depend on NEAMB every day, whether they navigate the web with a mouse, a keyboard, or a screen reader, the platform now gives them the same reliable access to their benefits and financial information.
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