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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