We built Accessibility Tracker to address a lot of the inefficiencies when it comes to traditional remediation from an audit report spreadsheet. Here are some of the pain points that often came up:
- issue validation involved 3+ rounds of emailing the audit report with validation comments back and forth
- clients needed to purchase more technical support hours for help with fixes and validation
- clients wanted to know exactly which accessibility issues to prioritize based on their objective
- clients had difficulty coordinating which team members worked on what issues
- there wasn’t a way to keep organized comments (for one issue) in the spreadsheet
- clients couldn’t filter and sort columns by the data they want to (e.g., sorting by issues assigned to certain team members)
Sure, we could manually push through all of the issues — and we did — but Accessibility Tracker now takes light work of all of these items, saving both us and clients a lot of time and money. Let’s look at each bullet point.
Issue Validation
Issue validation can take several hours. Here’s what’s happening:
- We deliver the audit.
- Client fixes the issues.
- We validate that the fixes are made correctly inside a column added to the report.
- If the issues has not been resolved, we provide further feedback.
- This process continues until the client reaches full WCAG conformance or is satisfied.
Step 5 is where validation can take longer than you might think because not all developers immediately pick up on how to implement the fix correctly. And, if they do, they might create another issue when they’re making the fix.
And it’s not only the time that’s a factor. We charge $195/hour so extended validation can be costly.
Tracker helps validation in two big ways:
- 5 AI tools built inside of Tracker help developers understand how to understand and fix each issue (and give alternative ways to fix)
- We can validate issues inside of Tracker so we don’t need to email validation and comments back and forth
Issue Prioritization
Another question that we get asked by clients is what order to make the fixes in. Before, this would be a manual exercise where we would use technical support hours to order the issues.
Now clients can sort and filter by any number of columns and we have two prioritization built into the dashboard that clients can use to order all issues in seconds.
Project Coordination
When you’re working from a spreadsheet, it can be difficult to track who is working on what issue and what the issue’s status is. With Accessibility Tracker, we can assign issues to any team member working on the project and even sort and filter by those issues so we know exactly how much progress has been made.
Comment Log
Try keeping a comment log for multiple issues in an Excel spreadsheet. It doesn’t work out too cleanly — especially when multiple team members are leaving comments.
Comments are now problem inside of Tracker. Now all you need to do is view any issue and then add comments for that issue.
Sort and Filter
As we mentioned, now you can sort and filter issues in every practical way available. Sort by:
- issue status
- location of the issue
- team member
- date of validation
- custom priority
This means you can quickly look at the issues you want to.
Key Takeaways
Digital accessibility projects are now much easier to organize and complete with Accessibility Tracker. Because we built our web app based on years of experience, it’s specifically designed to make the remediation process incredibly efficient, saving money, time, and mental energy.
Sign up for a free or paid plan at AccessibilityTracker.com.
