Built right
The things your funders and regulators require — accessibility, privacy, findability, rights compliance — have one thing in common: they are all much cheaper to build in from the start than to bolt on afterwards.
MADDev builds them in. Not as a separate compliance exercise, but as a natural consequence of building Drupal well: semantic HTML, clean content architecture, structured data, and a genuine respect for the people who will use the site. Get them right once, and they stay right.
WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility is a proven MADDev specialty — not a checkbox exercise, not an add-on line on the invoice. It is built into the theme layer on every project: semantic heading structure, keyboard navigation, screen-reader compatibility, correct colour contrast, and alt text handled at the content model level so editors cannot accidentally break it.
Academia, NGOs, and government bodies increasingly require WCAG compliance as a funder condition or an institutional standard. Assistive-technology use is higher in these sectors than in the general public — ageing researchers, users with visual or motor impairments, and screen-reader use in field contexts. Accessible Drupal at this price point is not a compromise. The Quercus Project is the proof: tested to WCAG 2.1 AA, not declared.
For clients where compliance documentation matters — procurement, institutional review, audit — we can provide a build-time record of the accessibility decisions made.
Privacy by default: the data your site collects should be the minimum necessary to make it work, handled transparently, and never sold or shared without clear consent. GDPR-conscious architecture means data minimisation and retention policies built into the content model — not discovered during an audit.
When a project needs analytics or consent management, we build it minimal and privacy-first: explicit opt-in, no dark patterns, cookies only for what genuinely requires them.
This site runs no trackers. There is no cookie banner because nothing follows you here. That is not an oversight — it is a deliberate choice, and the way we build every site that does not need them.
Being findable by search engines and AI answer-engines comes from the same discipline as building accessibly: semantic, server-rendered HTML; a clean heading structure; structured data that names what the page is about; fast load times. These are not separate compliance tasks — they are what a well-built site looks like.
Every MADDev site ships with JSON-LD structured data on every page
(schema.org Organisation, Service, CreativeWork, FAQPage as applicable),
correct semantic HTML throughout, and a /llms.txt file for AI
tools that look for it. This site exemplifies the approach — not as a demo,
but because there is no reason to build it any other way.
AI answer-engines increasingly surface specific, detailed, well-structured pages over generic ones. The same investment that makes a site accessible makes it answer-engine-ready. Do it right once.
Sites that aggregate, republish, or archive material they do not all own face a rights-management problem most CMS platforms ignore. MADDev has built the core of a solution: track rights per content item, control display and access by rights status, manage attribution and takedown processes, and ensure the site's behaviour reflects the legal reality of its content at all times.
Bulk rights operations and a clean editorial interface for rights tracking are built and available now. A full end-to-end rights workflow — submissions, licensing, renewal — is on the roadmap.
This capability is built for archives, libraries, content aggregators, media organisations, and academic or NGO sites that regularly publish third-party material. If your content mix includes items you do not own outright, this is the responsible way to manage it.
Almost certainly yes. UK and EU public-sector bodies are legally required to meet WCAG 2.1 AA under the Web Accessibility Directive. Many funding bodies — research councils, European Commission programmes, large foundations — include WCAG compliance as a grant condition for any project with a public-facing digital component. Universities are required to comply under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations. If your site is funded by or reports to any of these bodies, compliance is not optional.
Only if your site sets cookies that are not strictly necessary for it to function. Analytics cookies, advertising pixels, social-media embeds, and many third-party tracking scripts all require explicit consent under GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive. A site that carries none of these — as this one does — needs no banner. The question to ask is not "how do I add a consent mechanism?" but "what are we collecting, and do we actually need it?"
AI answer-engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and others) draw from crawled content, structured data, and increasingly from llms.txt-style machine-readable context files. Sites that are well-structured, semantically correct, and detail-rich — with JSON-LD structured data, clear entity signals, and specific factual content — are significantly more likely to be surfaced by these tools than generic, visually-styled pages with thin content. This is not a new discipline: it is what good web development has always looked like, now more directly rewarded.
With a rights-tracking content architecture built into the CMS from the start. Each content item carries its rights status — owned, licensed, public domain, restricted, pending — and the system controls display, access, and attribution based on that status automatically. When rights change (a licence expires, a takedown is requested), the effect on the site is immediate and consistent. This is a MADDev-built capability available for the right projects — get in touch to discuss your specific situation.
When it is built in from the start: no. When it is retrofitted to a site that was not designed for it: significantly yes. The audit, the remediation work, the retesting, and the ongoing maintenance of the fixes typically cost more than building it correctly in the first place. MADDev builds accessibility into the theme layer as standard — the cost is the same whether the site needs WCAG compliance or not, because the correct approach is the same approach.
Tell us what you are building. We will tell you honestly whether accessibility, privacy, or rights-management is a requirement for your project — and what it will cost to do it properly.