Accessibility: Working with issue filters

Summary

Siteimprove issue filters help you evaluate and prioritize accessibility issues by allowing you to sort them based on difficulty, responsibility, element type, and conformance level—so you can focus on the issues most relevant to your skills, role, and goals.

What it is

Accessible solutions often require different skill sets. Improving accessibility is a cross-disciplinary practice. Siteimprove makes it easy for you to evaluate the list of accessibility issues through a range of filters, empowering you to work and focus on issues relevant to your individual skills, domain knowledge, and preferences. Filters can also be good as a starting point when delegating issues to different team members. They help you to ensure that issues are assigned to those with the knowledge in that area.

The article explains how to take advantage of the filters available under Issues.

How it works

Difficulty

Start with the Difficulty level filter to fix issues matching your skill level in regards to technical complexity and accessibility knowledge. You can choose Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, or Expert. The difficulty scale is a subjective rating from Siteimprove. It may not correspond with your particular setup and should be considered as an estimation. 

Responsibility

With the Responsibility filter, you can easily find issues relevant to your domain competencies. While accessibility issues often require multiple competencies to fix, they can in most cases be linked to a primary competency. Responsibility lets you focus on issues related to Content Writing, Development, UX Design, and Visual Design, so you can start where it makes most sense to your specific domain knowledge.

Element type

With the Element type filter, you get a clear overview of how issues are connected to specific components. For example, you can tackle all issues related to forms, and then move on to images. The filter includes all content elements on your site: Forms, Headings, Images, Page layout, Links, Tables, Other.

Conformance

The Conformance filter lets you drill down on issues based on conformance level, i.e., WCAG levels (A, AA, AAA) and best practices. If you already have a site target, this filter might not be that important to you but it can help you focus at one conformance level at a time.

We hope you feel well-equipped to jump into the list of accessibility issues with this range of powerful filters. 

Key takeaways

• Issue filters allow you to prioritize accessibility work based on skill level, role, and goals
• Filters support better delegation across cross-functional teams
• Multiple filter types (difficulty, responsibility, element type, conformance) provide flexible ways to focus work
• Using filters improves efficiency when working through large sets of accessibility issues