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.
Lawsuit Risk
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.
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.
We officially release Accessibility Tracker in March of 2025 so be sure to check back soon to get access and quickly and easily prioritize the issues in your audit report by whichever formula works best for your organization.
