Prioritize issues inside of Accessibility Tracker using one of two prioritization formulas:
- User Impact: Weighted formula that assigns a score to issues based on overall user impact
- Risk Factor: Data-driven formula based on claims made in actual ADA website complaints filed in courts
The Accessibility Tracker platform can prioritize issues in a matter of seconds (more on this at the end), but first let’s explain the two ways you may want to prioritize.
When you get an accessibility audit report back, it can easily have 100+ issues to work through. And since you’re forward thinking enough to be reading this blog post, you want to know what issues you should be working on first.
Traditionally, digital accessibility companies might give clients one of a few rudimentary methods:
- issues are marked as grouped classifications such as:
- critical
- severe
- important
- issues are sorted by conformance level:
- A
- AA
But let’s get more precise than this.
Table of Contents
Lawsuit Risk
We’ve spent a lot of time researching website accessibility complaints / lawsuits. Too much time.
What you need to know is that some accessibility issues are claimed more than others and so you want to eliminate those first.
For clients who are concerned with ADA website lawsuit risk, we recommend prioritizing issues by the order set out in our ADA Compliance Course. Here are the three most commonly claimed issues:
- alt text
- headings
- keyboard board navigability
From there, we continue on telling you how to find and fix the issues in sequential order of most risk to the least risk.
By the way, this order is based on real data from real complaints filed in court by the most active plaintiffs’ law firms.
Note: Here is a redacted version of my lawsuits spreadsheet without accessibility issues. This just shows you some of lengths we’ve gone to for precision.
Note 2: If you upload your accessibility audit report (in Excel spreadsheet format) to our Accessibility Tracker platform, you can instantly sort the issues by our Risk Factor formula which prioritizes by the same complaint (lawsuit) data.
Beyond Automated Scans
One important takeaway for website owners and defense attorneys both is that the scan era is over. This has been the case for a while, but after examining the latest complaints, it’s crystal clear that plaintiffs’ law firms have evolved from merely looking for issues returned by automated scans like WAVE or Google Lighthouse.
Yes, some plaintiffs’ lawyers still use scans — including PowerMapper beyond WAVE and Lighthouse, but the overwhelming majority of complaints name accessibility issues that scans do not detect.
I suspect a large number of plaintiffs’ law firms now have their own teams that include accessibility professionals manually evaluating websites. It’s not only the issues that are being claimed that lead me to this theory – it’s the level of specificity and sophistication of the details that makes me think this.
Notable Accessibility Claims Cited in Lawsuits
The move towards manual means that there has also been a shift in my accessibility issue prioritization recommendations. You can find my exact prioritization of the top 15 issues inside the ADA Compliance Course.
In addition to the priority, I would also pay attention to the following themes:
- Skip to Content Links: Many website owners sued had skip links in place, but because they allegedly didn’t skip content, it would up as a claimed issue.
- Sub-menus: Be careful if you have submenus. Submenu label and keyboard issues came up very frequently.
- Issue vs. Success Criteria: There’s not a clean alignment with WCAG and the issues claimed in complaints. On occasion, the issues claimed aren’t even requirements in WCAG standards (2.1 or 2.2, AA or AAA). And many other times, it’s not so much the success criteria requirements that I recommend focusing in on – it’s how plaintiffs’ lawyers apply their interpretation of the requirement and what content they most frequently look at.
Impact (Based On Scoring System)
Another formula is to order the issues by impact.
The majority of WCAG success criteria are very important. The drafters of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines spent long hours pouring over exactly what considerations to include in the technical standards so it’s not there’s a long list of nominal success criteria.
Some issues can be outright blockers to access. Moving down a tier, some issues are more likely to have a significant negative impact on user experience.
And continuing down the rank of accessibility issues, some are more likely to be inconveniences. Last, there are a few success criteria that are mostly irrelevant.
As such, we took on the task of ordering all success criteria in WCAG versions 2.0 AA, 2.1 AA, and 2.2 AA to give clients a way to sort accessibility issues by impact. We accomplished this by creating a weighted, 100 point scoring system based on five key factors that reflect how significantly each success criterion affects real users:
- Access Blocking Severity (35 points)
- Measures how completely the issue prevents users from accessing content
- Example: Keyboard accessibility (2.1.1) scores maximum points because keyboard-only users are completely blocked from using non-keyboard accessible websites
- Workaround Feasibility (25 points)
- Evaluates how easily users can find alternative ways to access content when an issue exists
- Example: Missing alternative text (1.1.1) scores high because there’s simply no way for screen reader users to understand an unlabeled image
- User Population Size (15 points)
- Considers how many users are potentially affected by the issue
- Example: Name, Role, Value (4.1.2) scores high because it affects nearly all assistive technology users
- Contextual Criticality (10 points)
- Assesses how important the affected functionality is to completing core tasks
- Example: Error Identification (3.3.1) scores high because without it, users can’t complete forms
- Frequency/Likelihood Factor (15 points)
- Evaluates how commonly the issue occurs on typical websites
- Example: Text Spacing (1.4.12) scores at the bottom because it rarely creates significant barriers on modern websites
Special Considerations
We also applied practical adjustments:
- Parsing (4.1.1) was placed at the bottom because the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) literally marked it as obsolete in WCAG 2.2
- Issues that are both severe barriers (≥30 points in severity) and have few workarounds (≥20 points) received an 8% boost to emphasize true blockers
- We manually adjusted scores for certain criteria that are theoretically important but less impactful in practice
Ranking accessibility issues is an imperfect exercise – some issues will be extremely important for users who have certain disabilities vs. other issues will be more impactful to users with other disabilities, but clients are going to work through accessibility issues in some order either way, so we cane up with an order that starts with the issues that we think will have the most impact to the most users first and continues sequentially by impact.
This ordering, along with our lawsuit risk sequence are both features in our new Accessibility Tracker software.
Accessibility Tracker
Accessibility Tracker gives anyone the ability to upload an audit spreadsheet (you don’t have to be an Accessible.org client to upload your spreadsheet) and instantly sort by either of our two prioritization formulas.
We tie the formula to the WCAG success criterion associated with each issue so it’s a simple sort because virtually all audits have a column for the WCAG success criterion (if yours doesn’t, we’ll add it).
From there, there are many features that come with Accessibility Tracker. One relevant one for the priority discussion is your team can mark what issues they’ve fixed and an external auditor can validate the fix and mark whether or not the fix has been made correctly.
If you have an audit report in Excel spreadsheet format, you can instantly prioritize issues inside of Accessibility Tracker.
