Section508.gov has a Technology Accessibility Playbook and if you look at “Play 11: Track and Resolve Accessibility Issues,” our app, Accessibility Tracker, syncs up very nicely with what it’s calling for. Here’s how.
Play 10 describes how to test and validate Section 508 conformance. Testing will produce a list of issues that need to be tracked, prioritized, and resolved over the long term. End users may also report technology accessibility issues that need to be assessed, tracked, prioritized, and resolved.
Once you have an Excel spreadsheet of the issues, Tracker enables you to:
- Prioritize the issues (by custom priority or one of two prioritization formulas)
- Set the status of issues (not started, in progress, completed, on hold, validated)
- Track the issues (you’ll know the progress of your project based on the status you assign)
- Resolved issues are marked as validated
Next, look at these key questions in Play 11:
- How does your agency identify and track technology accessibility issues from initial report through resolution
- What process do you use to categorize, prioritize, troubleshoot, and identify root causes of accessibility issues?
The answer for the first bullet is Tracker. The second for the second bullet can also partially be Tracker.
Next, Tracker takes care of big chunks from the Basic Checklist:
Develop a process to track and monitor accessibility:
- For internal projects and software development, assess your bug tracking system for suitability in tracking accessibility issues.
- Assess your current Help Desk suitability for tracking and resolving accessibility issues reported by end-users.
Track and monitor — that’s a double check. Tracker comes with automatic monthly progress reports for monitoring.
Buck tracking system for tracking accessibility issues. Check.
Also, you can simply enter a project inside of Tracker specifically for issues reported by end-users. Check.
Here’s another chunk from the Section 508 checklist:
Develop a process to categorize accessibility issues. For example:
- Issues resulting from legal complaints/actions: These items require formal, careful, expedited handling by the 508 Program Team, the IT department, general counsel, and possibly external Federal entities (DOJ, GSA, etc.).
- Technical compliance issues identified through testing or informal user reports: These items need to be addressed through risk mitigation processes.
- Deployment issues resulting from how, where and when IT services and technology are provided.
After you’ve developed a process on how to categorize issues, you can actually put the issues into categories by simply creating projects inside of Tracker then add a new issue to the respective project every time an issue arises.
One more chunk from the checklist:
- Develop a process to prioritize issues. For example:
- Critical issues may prevent an end user from accessing or using the technology.
- Major issues may make it extremely difficult, but not impossible, for an end user to ensure access or use the technology.
- Minor issues do not materially affect the use of the product, but may represent a technical defect.
- Develop an escalation process to address the need for correction action based on risk and impact on end users.
Tracker has the ability to prioritize issues three different ways:
- Set a custom prioritization of designating issues as high, medium, or low priority
- Use our user impact formula (designed using a weighted scoring system that scores on a scale of 0-100 on what issues have the most overall user impact)
- Use or risk factor formula (based on data extracted from website accessibility lawsuits)
Key Takeaway
We built Accessibility Tracker based on project experience to make our clients’ objectives of full WCAG conformance as seamless and efficient as possible. As you might expect, this aligns closely with project guides and best practices like Section 508’s Playbook and many others.
You can sign up for a free plan at AccessibilityTracker.com.
