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Re: priority accessibility issues

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From: Mark Magennis
Date: Apr 13, 2022 8:43AM

Steve makes an interesting basic point that it's not all about the accessibility impact on the user.

In my company, we log bugs in Jira and Jira requires a priority - Critical, High, Medium, or Low. The Accessibility Office which either logs the bugs or triages them uses a schema pretty much like what Glen outlined, based on user impact, although we don't take into account whether or not they are WCAG failures.

But then ... bugs go into development sprints and it is the Product Owner (or feature owner) or the Scrum Master (Agile process) who decides what goes into a sprint, i.e. what gets fixed first. This takes into account some of what Steve mentioned, including development effort, current development focus, customer interest (some bugs were initially reported by customers so get to the front of the queue), as well as our accessibility priority and, sometimes, whether it is a WCAG failure or not and will therefore affect our VPAT (I know it's not the correct term so please don't point it out). Ultimately, everyone gets to input their two cents worth and the Product Owner is the final arbiter, although in practice it's very often the Accessibility Office that has the biggest say, which is great because we always go for max user impact.

As an aside, the most impactful bugs are very frequently not WCAG failures!

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Steve Green
Sent: 13 April 2022 15:10
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [WebAIM] priority accessibility issues

That's a question I get asked a lot, and I refuse to answer it because it is not a useful question. In particular, it is not what the person asking it really wants to know. And it hides a lot of complexity. So the answer is "why do you want to know?"



The person asking it usually wants to know something different, such as:



* In what sequence should we fix the bugs?

* Which bugs can we go live with and which must be fixed first?

* Can we leave some bugs permanently unfixed?



Once I get a sensible question like this, my answer is usually “if you are going to fix some or all of the bugs before going live, do so in the sequence that makes the most efficient use of development and testing resources.” You may choose to fix some low-impact bugs if they are in the same area of code as a high-impact bug you have decided to test.



Prioritisation of post-launch fixes is rather different and there are a lot of factors to consider. For a US website I might recommend prioritising all the issues (including false positives) that automated tools report in order to minimise the likelihood of a spurious legal claim. For each bug, you might want to assess which user group(s) are impacted, how large such groups are, the extent to which they are impacted, the importance of the inaccessible feature or content and whether there are workarounds. Most of that is subjective and some is unknowable. There is no right answer.



The important thing to explain to project managers (since it is usually they who ask the question) is that you can't just say that WCAG success criterion 1.3.1 is higher priority than 1.4.3 because it's level A rather than AA. Taking into account the criteria I mentioned above, some level AA non-conformances might be much more important than some level A ones on a particular website. And you certainly shouldn't generalise across websites.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd




-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Nathan Clark
Sent: 13 April 2022 14:49
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] priority accessibility issues



Dear list,

When doing accessibility audit on a website, what do you all consider to be low, medium or high priority accessibility bugs?



Thanks.

Sincerely,

Nathan Clark



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Nathan Clark

QA Automation Analyst Tech team

Accessibility assistant

CPACC

cell: 410-446-7259

email: <EMAIL REMOVED> <mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> >

101 Village Blvd

Princeton, NJ 08540

SMBE & Minority Owned Business



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