Clients frequently ask us how they should prioritize accessibility issues in their audit report? This a question that’s been coming up with years with answers orbiting around the same answers:
- Fix level A issues first, then AA
- Fix WCAG 2.0 issues first, then 2.1
- Go with three tiers: low, medium, high and start with high
- Similarly: important, urgent, critical and start with critical
Fine, but that’s not really the precision you’d like to see. And because this an important and common pain point, we came up with a better answer.
We created two prioritization formulas:
- Risk factor
- Issue impact
Risk factor is a data-driven formula that prioritizes accessibility issues by how likely they are to claimed in a website accessibility complaint (alleging that the website owner is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act because their website has technical accessibility issues). To create the formula, we simply collected complaints filed by the most active plaintiffs’ law firms and calculated what accessibility issues came up the first most often, second most often, etc.
Issue impact is our second formula which is based on a weighed scoring system that assigns points based on the severity and likelihood of negatively impacting users with disabilities.
And what we’ve done is baked both of these formulas into Accessibility Tracker, our brand new software for 2025 that enables anyone to upload their audit report and instantly sort issues by any number of columns, including either of our prioritization formulas.
So what you can do is upload your Excel spreadsheet and instantly sort by user impact and immediately you’ll have our precise prioritization formula that prioritizes accessibility issues by impact.
You can also cross sort. Let’s say you want to only look at issues that have been assigned to a certain team member and, then, from there, sort by risk factor. It’s all here.
Of course, this is only one of the key features in Accessibility Tracker.
You also get:
- AI ready to help you with remediation for each specific issue
- Monthly progress reports
- Time-stamped comment logs
- Status labels for each issue
You can use Accessibility Tracker basic features for free and if you’d like to upgrade, you get all of the premium features to save you time and money and move your accessibility project along much faster.
