CLAPA UK
About the Project
CLAPA UK is a national charity supporting families affected by cleft lip and palate. The platform serves a wide user base, from newly diagnosed parents to adult patients, so accessibility and clarity were the defining constraints for every design decision.
I built the frontend component library, resource directory, and community-facing pages, engineering each component for keyboard use, focus visibility, and screen-reader semantics from the start rather than retrofitting. The headless CMS integration allowed the CLAPA content team to manage all copy without touching code, reducing the maintenance overhead for their small team.
Outcomes
The rebuild shipped with improved Lighthouse accessibility scores and a significantly faster time-to-interactive on mobile, helped by lazy-loaded images and code-split routes. The resource directory, one of the most-used parts of the site, went from a flat list to a filterable, searchable module with debounced input and fully keyboard-operable controls.
The CLAPA team reported a meaningful drop in support tickets related to content navigation after the new information architecture went live.