Lightning-Fast 100 Score! Web Accessibility at High Speed! Fireworks for Lighthouse!

Master web accessibility!

"We've got S-tier frontend developers and markup specialists, and we're even handling UI for marketing automation tools—accessibility should be a breeze!" With such overconfident thinking, Liberogic's web accessibility project began... but it turned out to be the opening chapter of an epic struggle. Having set the lofty goal of full WCAG 2.2 compliance, we faced years of study sessions and endless debates. We came to realize, painfully, how naive we had been.

Looking back, there was an accessibility study session in the early days of the project years ago.
"What's the difference between WCAG and JIS X 8341-3:2016?"
"WCAG 2.0 and JIS X 8341-3:2016 are the same!"
Such elementary exchanges marked the beginning of a long, long journey.
"Is this conformance criterion something we understand this way?"
"No, that's a different criterion."
After countless debates and revisions, we finally reached a state where we could aim for WCAG 2.2 Conformance Level AA.

Let's rebuild our own website!

"Our website doesn't match our business, does it?"
With that single remark, our site redesign project was born.
"While we're at it, let's go all-in on accessibility, SEO, and more!"
Needless to say, our talented staff—busy as they were—gladly (probably) took on the challenge.

"This color fails the contrast ratio!"
"But it looks good from a design perspective..."
"Can we adjust it within the guidelines?"
Back and forth like this, navigating between design and accessibility.
Then comes markup—methodically checking off a ruthless list of test requirements.

Finally complete!
Though it was significantly delayed from our original plan, we felt genuine confidence in the technological progress we had achieved.

Achieved a perfect 100 in Lighthouse! And also highly rated in PageSpeed Insights!

Our site built with Astro + microCMS + Cloudflare naturally scores high in Lighthouse. Accessibility is flawless, as expected! Lighthouse's accessibility tests leverage the reliable axe-core, so our WCAG compliance efforts are evaluated quite directly.

As for performance, with many images and animations running, we initially plateaued. But after optimizing web font loading, reconsidering image compression and formats, and fine-tuning resource loading priorities through meticulous tuning, that moment finally arrived!

\100 points!/

All categories in the desktop Lighthouse test achieved perfect scores! And the rumors were true. "Really? When you achieve a perfect 100 in Lighthouse, does Google launch celebratory fireworks for you?"

"No way!? Our previous site barely hit 80-90 points! Some credit goes to Astro, but this is incredible!"

PageSpeed Insights, another web performance measurement tool from Google, naturally recorded a perfect 100 as well.

Only PageSpeed Insights lacks special effects (fireworks). Since we kept seeing one at 99 and the other at 100, we'd like to request Google add some celebratory effect here too. 🎇

By the way, Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights scores fluctuate depending on network conditions, server state, and browser status at the moment of measurement, so even though we achieved a perfect 100, note that maintaining that score consistently isn't always possible.

Is a perfect 100 on mobile performance impossible? ...Something like this. (↑ We didn't capture it at the time, so this is a fairly recent screenshot)

The real goal lies beyond the score

But wait... if you think about it from a user perspective, isn't this the obvious result?

Rather than chasing scores, I believe that thoroughly designing for every person who actually uses the website leads to the highest evaluation. A "perfect 100 score" is merely a checkpoint. The true goal is to create a website that's comfortable and easy to use for everyone!!

Currently, we're implementing various experimental features to verify operational feasibility, and the Lighthouse score has fluctuated lower than it was then. I keep innocently asking "Why, why...?", but obviously operational feasibility verification is more important to everyone than my selfish preferences.

And so our endless pursuit continues.