Accessible Campus Wayfinding Bridge

Kankakee Community College
React-based accessible wayfinding / WCAG bridge / cost-avoidance project

Overview

KCC needed a more accessible alternative to PDF-based campus maps, which created WCAG 2.1 AA concerns for users relying on assistive technologies. Vendor wayfinding platforms were available, but comparable options involved significant setup and recurring annual costs. A broader physical wayfinding and signage project was also expected later, so the college needed a practical bridge solution rather than a long-term vendor commitment.

I built an internal React-based campus wayfinding system to address the accessibility problem, preserve flexibility, and avoid an estimated $25,000 first-year vendor platform cost. The project also provided a real institutional use case for modern front-end application architecture because the experience behaved more like an application than a static web page.

Problem

Static PDF maps were not enough for accessible digital wayfinding. They were difficult to make fully usable for people using assistive technologies and created a compliance and user-experience gap as KCC advanced WCAG 2.1 AA readiness.

Key constraints

• PDF campus maps created accessibility concerns.
• Third-party wayfinding tools involved significant setup and annual licensing costs.
• A future physical wayfinding/signage project was already expected.
• The college needed a bridge solution that could be delivered quickly and maintained internally.
• The solution needed to support multi-campus wayfinding, structured location data, and task-based navigation.

Solution

I built a React-based accessible wayfinding bridge that supports multi-campus navigation, task-based user flows, structured location data, map interactions, and accessibility-informed interface patterns. React was appropriate because the system needed state, conditional rendering, reusable components, map-layer behavior, and application-like interaction patterns.

Business value

The project avoided an estimated first-year vendor cost of roughly $25,000, including setup and annual platform fees, while giving the college a maintainable, internally controlled bridge solution until the broader signage project could move forward.

Strategic value

This project demonstrated how internal web strategy and development capacity can reduce accessibility risk, avoid unnecessary recurring costs, and deliver a practical user-facing system faster than a typical vendor implementation cycle.

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