Prioritizing accessibility is an important ongoing process in managing accessibility across a portfolio of information technology (IT).
Prioritization includes two levels:
- Strategic
- Decide which products, applications, and systems to engage first, based on impact and risk
- Tactical
- Decide what parts of a system to review first, based on importance
- Decide which issues to address first, based on impact and urgency
Strategic Prioritization
The prioritization scale below is intended to help you determine the priority of a given IT by looking at intrinsic factors. Rather than assigning a priority per number, it is meant to guide you in assigning relative priorities for the IT in your unit.
Intrinsic Factors
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of users? | Small | Moderate number as a percentage | Medium number as a percentage | Large |
| Used in course work? | No | Yes, but not required | Yes, required, but small number of users | Yes, required, large number of users |
| Accessible alternative exists? | No | Yes, but it is not entirely equivalent | Yes, but users will need assistance to use it | Yes, and provides same benefits |
| Can you provide accomodation? | Yes | Yes, but slight impact on usability, time and dignity of user | Yes, but sizable impact on usability, time and dignity of user | No |
Extrinsic Factors
These are factors to consider when weighing which system has priority when the systems in question have the same priority given intrinsic factors.
- System lifecycle
- Consider if the system is new, growing, mature, or ready to be retired
- Longer expected lifetime means greater impact and higher priority
- Cost and effort
- When all other factors are equal, you can prioritize systems that are easier or less costly to improve
- Reputation
- Consider if the system is especially important to the reputation of the unit or the university
- When other factors are equal, you can prioritize systems with more importance to reputation
Tactical Prioritization
Consider starting with a pilot on your first review and remediation effort. This will provide you with:
- metrics that will help with estimates
- an idea of where you will need assistance, training and documentation.
Intrinsic Factors - Parts of a System
What should you consider when prioritizing areas?
- Common components: Reviewing components (such as templates, reusable elements, etc.) common to all parts of the system and addressing any issues found will immediately and tangibly improve the system, as it will remove many barriers with a small number of fixes.
-
Critical paths and workflows: For web applications, a set of use cases that exercise the core components will be useful to determine what parts of the application have priority.
For a static web presence, if you have access to analytics, you could use these to determine what areas receive the most traffic and take that into account in your review and remediation process.
- Crucial documents: Documents (Office, PDF, Google) frequently distributed or requested should be reviewed, especially those that are important to students.
Intrinsic factors - Impact of Issues
For manual functional testing, the scale below is guided by impact. If you are using one of the recommended automation tools, the tools themselves will assign a priority.
- Level 5 - Blocker: Prevents access to core processes or many secondary processes; causes harm or significant discomfort.
- Level 4 - Critical: Prevents access to some secondary processes; makes it difficult to access core processes or many secondary processes.
- Level 3 - Major: Makes it inconvenient to access core processes or many secondary processes.
- Level 2 - Minor: Makes it inconvenient to access isolated processes.
- Level 1 - Lesser: Usability observation.
Extrinsic Factors
Ease & Speed of Repair
Pragmatically, your ability to review and repair will also be a factor in prioritization. You may want to consider remediating issue types that you can tackle at the present moment, while you are building capacity to address others, for example.