Process

Accessibility Metrics, Reporting, and Dashboards

By EZUD Published · Updated

Accessibility Metrics, Reporting, and Dashboards

What gets measured gets managed. Without metrics, accessibility efforts depend on anecdotes and good intentions. With metrics, organizations can track progress, identify regressions, justify investment, and hold teams accountable. An accessibility dashboard makes this data visible to leadership, product teams, and accessibility practitioners.

Core Metrics

Issue Counts by Severity

Track the number of open accessibility issues classified as critical, major, minor, and best practice (see bug triage and prioritization). Trend this data over time:

  • A decreasing count of critical issues indicates that the most impactful barriers are being addressed.
  • A stable or increasing count suggests that new issues are being introduced as fast as old ones are fixed.

Conformance Score

Calculate the percentage of applicable WCAG 2.2 Level AA success criteria that the product fully meets. This is a coarse metric but useful for executive communication. Example: “Our primary product meets 78% of WCAG 2.2 Level AA criteria, up from 62% last quarter.”

Time to Resolution

Measure the average time from when an accessibility issue is reported to when it is verified as resolved. Break this down by severity:

  • Critical issues should be resolved within days.
  • Major issues within weeks.
  • Minor issues within the current quarter.

Increasing resolution times signal capacity or prioritization problems.

Defect Injection Rate

Track where in the lifecycle accessibility issues are introduced and where they are caught:

  • Issues caught during design review (cheapest)
  • Issues caught during development or code review
  • Issues caught during QA
  • Issues caught in production or reported by users (most expensive)

As shift-left practices mature, the distribution should shift earlier. This metric directly measures the effectiveness of proactive accessibility investment.

Automated Scan Pass Rate

Track the percentage of pages or components that pass automated accessibility scans (axe-core, Pa11y) with zero critical violations. This metric works well as a CI/CD gate and provides a daily pulse on accessibility health.

Training Coverage

Track the percentage of relevant roles (developers, designers, content creators, QA, product managers) that have completed accessibility training. See training guides for developers, designers, and content creators.

User Feedback

Track the volume and nature of accessibility-related feedback from users. Sources include:

  • Feedback forms on the accessibility statement page
  • Customer support tickets tagged as accessibility-related
  • App store reviews mentioning accessibility

Building a Dashboard

Audience

Design the dashboard for multiple audiences:

  • Executive view: Conformance score, critical issue count, quarter-over-quarter trend, risk summary.
  • Program manager view: All core metrics, team-level breakdowns, roadmap milestone progress.
  • Team view: Issues assigned to the team, resolution status, automated scan results, training completion.

Tools

  • Custom dashboards: Build with your existing BI tools (Power BI, Tableau, Looker, Grafana). Pull data from your issue tracker (Jira, Azure DevOps), automated scan results, and training records.
  • Pa11y Dashboard: An open-source web-based dashboard specifically for accessibility monitoring results.
  • Deque Dashboard: Commercial offering that aggregates axe scan results across products and teams.
  • Spreadsheet-based: For smaller organizations, a well-maintained spreadsheet with charts can serve as an effective dashboard.

Data Sources

  • Issue tracker: Pull issue counts, severity classifications, assignment, and resolution dates from Jira, Azure DevOps, or similar tools.
  • CI/CD pipeline: Pull automated scan results from axe-core, Pa11y, or Lighthouse runs.
  • Audit reports: Manual audit findings from periodic accessibility audits.
  • Training records: Completion data from your LMS or training tracker.
  • User feedback: Accessibility-tagged tickets from support and feedback forms.

Reporting Cadence

  • Weekly: Automated scan results and critical issue status (for team leads and accessibility program managers).
  • Monthly: Full metric review including resolution trends and training progress (for program managers and leadership).
  • Quarterly: Executive summary with conformance score, risk assessment, and roadmap progress (for leadership and governance stakeholders).
  • Annually: Comprehensive report aligned with accessibility maturity assessment (for organizational strategy).

Using Metrics to Drive Decisions

Metrics are only valuable if they inform action:

  • If critical issues are increasing, investigate root causes and adjust governance or training.
  • If time to resolution is growing, assess team capacity and prioritization practices.
  • If the defect injection rate shows issues clustering in late stages, invest in shift-left practices.
  • If training coverage is low in a specific role, prioritize training for that group.

Key Takeaways

  • Track issue counts by severity, conformance score, time to resolution, defect injection rate, scan pass rate, training coverage, and user feedback.
  • Build dashboards for executives, program managers, and teams, each with appropriate detail levels.
  • Report weekly (scan results), monthly (full metrics), quarterly (executive summary), and annually (maturity assessment).
  • Use metrics to identify problems and drive decisions, not just to report status.
  • Connect metrics to governance, training, and roadmap decisions for continuous improvement.

Sources

More in Process

Inclusive Design Process Guide: Building Accessibility Into Every Stage Guide Continuous Accessibility Monitoring Accessibility in Design Reviews Nothing About Us Without Us: The Principle That Shapes Inclusive Design

View all Process articles →