ReelAbilities

ReelAbilities is North America's largest disability-focused film festival — a flagship NYC festival, affiliate festivals across 15 cities, a streaming platform, a film-licensing marketplace, and an education program. We've worked with them since 2022; the platform rebuild was signed in 2024, launched in 2025, and we still run it today.

Where they started

By 2023, ReelAbilities ran on WordPress Multisite with Elementor — four separate web properties, each drifting apart:

• Films couldn't be added. Film records — Vimeo link, PDF, password — were hardcoded inside Elementor page source. The film list was capped at ~17 titles because adding one meant editing code.
• Page structure fought the editors. Designing a parent page in HTML blocks locked its content and broke child-page nesting.
• Manual everything. Guest itineraries for ~80 festival guests took days of spreadsheet work. The production schedule was a ~5,000-line Excel that, in the last two years on the old system, was never finished before the festival started.

In 2023 we built them a marketplace on WordPress for licensing films between host cities and rights-holders. It worked — but the customizations the payout flow really needed weren't possible inside third-party WordPress payment-gateway plugins, and the budget at the time didn't allow replacing them. We're including this because it's the honest setup for what came next: in 2024 they trusted us again — this time to rebuild the whole platform properly.

What we built

A single Next.js + Directus platform, delivered against a five-month plan, consolidating all four properties:

• 15 city festival sites as sub-paths (/houston/events, /toronto/films/…) off one codebase — no subdomains, by client requirement. Adding a new city takes about 30 minutes. Zero cross-city data leaks in 12+ months of production, enforced by role-based permission filters in the CMS.
• A block-based CMS the team actually uses: 26 content blocks; a new page takes 15–20 minutes with zero developer help. The content team has built 30+ pages on their own after a single 2-hour training session. Same-day page launches replaced a 1–2 week dev cycle.
• Registration and access automation: registering for a film fires confirmation and access emails automatically; every registration is visible in the backend.
• One-click guest itineraries replacing days of spreadsheet work per festival.
• Auto-generated production schedule with festival-specific rules baked in — 2h venue setup before first screening; 20-minute conversation + 20-minute changeover after each film — replacing the 5,000-line Excel.
• The marketplace, rebuilt inside the platform: seller magic-link approval → buyer download confirmation → admin payout notification, with orders auto-approving after 10 days if a seller doesn't act. The manual invoice-chasing is gone.
• Streaming, accessibility-first: every film carries two full video files — open captions, and open captions + audio description — instead of relying on a player's audio-track switcher that a blind user may never find. Open captions are always on, for every film.

Where AI runs inside the product — shipped features, not marketing:

• The image pipeline generates alt-text with OpenAI and compresses via TinyPNG — measured 38 hours saved per festival cycle (95% reduction) on a platform where alt-text is not optional.
• ReelRedirects: AI-suggested redirects for legacy URLs, auto-applied once click-confidence is high.
• Legacy disability-topic tags migrated with scripted AI classification.

Accessibility is the result that matters

This platform exists for disabled audiences — so accessibility is the metric we lead with, and it's current, not historical:

• Lighthouse accessibility: 97 — measured August 2026, on the live production homepage, a year-plus after launch. Not a launch-day number that decayed; run it yourself.
• Built to a WCAG 2.1 AA target by written mandate — the project rules open with "accessibility is ALWAYS the top priority." Semantic HTML foundation, skip links, keyboard navigation. (We don't claim third-party certification — no honest agency should without an audit.)
• Post-launch bar: an accessibility overlay failing on iPhone is treated as a breach of the product's reason for existing, not a UI bug — device screenshots required before merge.

Other measured results

Our own measurements, dated. Speed comparison measured at launch (2025) on the same pages.

During the 2026 festival season the platform's organic search traffic ramped from ~30 to a peak of 152 clicks/day (~5×) with rising average position — while the team ran the festival on it. (Google Search Console, our data.)

Honest notes on the stack

What we published elsewhere, repeated here: Directus needed 20–30% more development time than initial estimates for workarounds — silent image-upload failures, admin UI lag with concurrent editors, no config sync between environments. We'd still choose it for this use case; we'd budget for it differently.

Where it stands

Launched 2025; we still run it. Year two of ongoing support, near-daily contact, new cities pending signed agreements. The platform's next festival is already loaded.