For the 2025 edition of La Mercè, Barcelona City Council’s official festival website (https://www.barcelona.cat/lamerce/es) was updated and refactored in Drupal to ensure it remains a reliable, high-traffic hub for the city’s main annual celebration. The site aggregates the full programme, venues, schedules, and practical information for the festival dates, and includes dedicated tools such as accessibility filtering within the programme so users can easily find events that match their needs.
Our work for the 2025 refresh focused primarily on accessibility and front-end refactoring, strengthening compliance with public-sector accessibility expectations and improving the experience for all users, including those with hearing or mobility needs. The updated edition highlights accessible venues and events, and clearly communicates available measures (e.g., reserved areas, sign-language interpretation, induction loops, relaxed sessions), while keeping the platform performant and easy to navigate during peak festival demand.
About the project
Project goals
The 2025 edition of the La Mercè festival website aimed to remain the primary, high-traffic digital hub for Barcelona’s annual city celebration while significantly improving inclusivity. A core goal of this iteration was to strengthen accessibility for all audiences, ensuring that people with hearing, mobility, sensory, or cognitive needs could easily plan their festival experience. The update also sought to refresh and stabilize the platform ahead of peak seasonal demand, keeping navigation and programme discovery fast and reliable.
Requirements
To meet these goals, the project focused on an accessibility-first refactor of the Drupal site for the 2025 release. Requirements included:
- Enhancing the Programme experience so users can filter activities by accessibility measures (e.g., sign language, induction loops, relaxed/quiet sessions, accessible spaces for reduced mobility).
- Improving clarity and consistency of how accessibility information and icons are presented across venues and events.
- Strengthening front-end structure and templates to align with public-sector accessibility expectations (Barcelona’s municipal digital services target WCAG AA standards).
- Refactoring code and UI patterns to improve usability, performance, and maintainability for future festival editions under tight annual timelines.
Outcome
The result is a refactored Drupal website for La Mercè 2025 that provides a more inclusive and dependable user experience during one of the city’s busiest cultural periods. Accessibility content is now easier to discover and act on, especially through the dedicated Accessibility filter in the programme and clearer event-level indicators. The refreshed front-end improves overall navigation and resilience for high concurrent traffic, and it leaves the platform better prepared for future editions with a cleaner, more maintainable codebase.
Back to topWhy Drupal was chosen
Drupal was chosen for the La Mercè website because it provides a public-sector-ready platform that combines accessibility, scalability, and editorial flexibility—all essential for a flagship city event site that must work for everyone and handle intense seasonal traffic.
First, accessibility was a core driver. Drupal core is built with an explicit commitment to WCAG AA compliance, backed by an active accessibility team and standards that guide both front-end and authoring experiences. This makes it a strong foundation for delivering inclusive festival information and for continuously improving accessibility edition after edition.
Technical Specifications
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Key modules/theme/distribution used:
