Tracking accessibility issues requires systematic organization and consistent updates throughout your remediation project. Whether you’re managing dozens or hundreds of issues, you need a method that maintains clarity while enabling team collaboration and progress monitoring.
| Key Component | What It Means for You |
|---|---|
| Issue Management System | Upload audit reports and track each accessibility issue through remediation to validation |
| Team Collaboration Tools | Assign issues to team members, add notes, and coordinate fixes across departments |
| Progress Analytics | Visual dashboards showing completion rates, issue distribution, and project status |
| Status Tracking | Mark issues as not started, in progress, completed, validated, or on hold |
| Reporting Features | Generate progress reports for stakeholders and compliance documentation |
Tracking Issues with Spreadsheets
Most organizations begin tracking accessibility issues using Excel or Google Sheets. Your audit report likely arrives as a spreadsheet already, making this the default starting point. The initial spreadsheet contains columns for the issue description, WCAG success criterion, location, severity, and recommended fix.
To track remediation progress, you’ll need to add several columns:
- Status (not started, in progress, completed, validated)
- Assigned to (team member responsible)
- Date assigned
- Date completed
- Date validated
- Notes (implementation details, questions, validation feedback)
- Priority (high, medium, low)
Setting Up Your Tracking Spreadsheet
Start by adding a Status column immediately after the issue description. Use dropdown lists or data validation to ensure consistent status labels across all issues. Common status options include:
- Not Started
- In Progress
- Completed (by developer)
- Under Review
- Validated (by auditor)
- On Hold
- Needs Work
Add an “Assigned To” column with team member names. Create another column for “Date Modified” to track when each issue was last updated. This helps identify stalled issues that haven’t seen progress recently.
Consider adding a Priority column if your audit doesn’t already include severity ratings. You might prioritize based on user impact, page importance, or legal risk factors.
Managing Updates and Versions
Version control becomes critical when multiple people work from the same spreadsheet. Save your spreadsheet with version numbers (AccessibilityAudit_v1, v2, v3) or dates (AccessibilityAudit_2025-01-15). Maintain a master copy that only one person updates to avoid conflicting changes.
For Google Sheets, you can see revision history and track changes over time. For Excel, you’ll need to manually track versions or use SharePoint’s version control features.
Email becomes the primary communication channel. Team members email when they’ve completed fixes. Project managers email updated spreadsheets weekly. Auditors email validation results. This creates long email threads with multiple spreadsheet attachments, making it difficult to determine which version is current.
Common Spreadsheet Challenges
Manual tracking introduces several friction points that slow down projects:
Data integrity issues – Someone accidentally deletes a row or overwrites formulas. Sorting goes wrong and data gets misaligned. Multiple people edit simultaneously, creating conflicts.
Communication gaps – Discussions about specific issues happen across email, chat, and meetings. Important context gets lost. New team members can’t find historical discussions about why certain decisions were made.
Limited visibility – Generating progress reports requires manual calculation. You count completed issues, divide by total issues, and create charts manually. Real-time status isn’t available unless someone recently updated and shared the spreadsheet.
Scale limitations – Spreadsheets become unwieldy with hundreds of issues. Filtering and sorting slow down. Finding specific issues requires scrolling through massive tables.
Transitioning to Platform-Based Tracking
Accessibility Tracker eliminates the manual overhead of spreadsheet management by creating a centralized platform for issue tracking. Instead of emailing spreadsheets, all team members work from the same real-time dashboard.
The transition starts by uploading your existing audit spreadsheet. Accessibility Tracker extracts all issue data automatically, mapping columns from your audit report to the platform’s tracking system. Each issue becomes an individual item with its own page containing all relevant details.
Issue Management Features
Each issue in Accessibility Tracker contains the complete context from your audit:
- Issue description and location
- WCAG success criterion
- Applicable code
- Auditor’s recommendation
- Users affected
The platform adds tracking capabilities on top of this foundation:
- Status tracking with seven predefined labels
- Team member assignment
- Comment logs for each issue
- Timeline showing creation and update dates
- Priority settings (custom or formula-based)
Real-Time Collaboration
Team members see updates immediately when someone changes an issue’s status or adds a comment. No more asking “did you get my email about issue #47?” or “which spreadsheet version has your latest updates?”
Developers mark issues as completed when they finish fixes. Auditors see these completed issues in their queue for validation. If an issue needs more work, the auditor marks it “Needs Work” with specific feedback in the comment log. The developer sees this update immediately and can address the feedback.
Prioritization Formulas
Rather than manually deciding which issues to fix first, Accessibility Tracker includes two prioritization formulas:
The risk factor formula scores issues based on lawsuit data, identifying which WCAG failures appear most frequently in legal complaints. Issues with scores of 100 represent the highest legal risk.
The user impact formula uses a weighted scoring system considering access blocking severity, workaround feasibility, affected user population, contextual criticality, and frequency likelihood. Scores range from 0-100 based on overall impact to users with disabilities.
Teams can sort issues instantly by either formula or set custom priorities for specific issues that need immediate attention.
Progress Analytics
Instead of manually calculating completion percentages, Accessibility Tracker displays real-time analytics:
- Total issues across all projects
- Number of issues in each status
- Completion percentage
- Distribution charts by status, priority, and WCAG criterion
- High-risk and high-impact issue counts
These visualizations update automatically as team members work through issues. Project managers can check progress anytime without requesting updates or calculating percentages.
AI Assistance for Remediation
When developers encounter unfamiliar issues, they can use integrated AI tools directly within each issue’s page. Five pre-configured tools provide different types of assistance:
- Simplify and Explain translates technical language into plain English
- Detailed Technical Answer provides code examples
- Alternative Approaches suggests different fixes
- WCAG Standards explains the requirement
- Custom Analysis answers specific questions
The AI already has the issue’s complete context from the audit report, eliminating the need to copy details into ChatGPT or craft prompts.
Workflow Comparison
Spreadsheet workflow:
- Download latest spreadsheet version
- Find your assigned issues
- Update status for completed work
- Add notes about implementation
- Save new version
- Email team about updates
- Wait for validation feedback via email
- Download newer version with feedback
- Make additional fixes
- Repeat update cycle
Accessibility Tracker workflow:
- Log into dashboard
- View assigned issues
- Fix issue using AI guidance if needed
- Mark as completed
- Auditor validates in platform
- Move to next issue
The platform workflow eliminates version confusion, email coordination, and manual progress calculation. Teams complete projects significantly faster when they’re not managing spreadsheet logistics.
Key Insights
Spreadsheet tracking works for small projects but becomes increasingly difficult as issue counts grow and more team members get involved. The manual overhead of maintaining spreadsheets, coordinating updates, and calculating progress consumes hours that could be spent actually fixing issues.
Platform-based tracking like Accessibility Tracker transforms issue management from a coordination challenge into a streamlined workflow. Real-time updates, automatic analytics, and integrated AI assistance help teams complete remediation projects in significantly less time than spreadsheet-based approaches.
FAQ
Q: Can I import my existing audit spreadsheet into Accessibility Tracker?
A: Yes, Accessibility Tracker accepts Excel spreadsheets from any audit provider. The platform automatically maps columns and extracts all issue data during upload.
Q: How do validation workflows work in the platform?
A: After developers mark issues as completed, auditors review the fixes directly in the platform. They can validate successful fixes or mark issues as “Needs Work” with specific feedback in the comment log.
Q: What happens to discussions about specific issues?
A: Each issue has its own comment log where all discussions remain permanently attached. Team members can see the complete history of questions, clarifications, and implementation notes.
Q: Can multiple team members work simultaneously?
A: Yes, all team members work from the same real-time dashboard. Changes appear immediately for everyone, eliminating version conflicts and update delays.
Q: How does the platform calculate progress?
A: Progress calculations happen automatically based on issue statuses. The platform shows completion percentages, status distributions, and other metrics that update in real-time as team members work through issues.