Idea: link up criteria with audit phases

[korompaiistvan]

Preface

I understand that the five-stage fast pass audit is supposed to be just that, a fast pass, and that a deep audit should consider all the individual criteria carefully. But my brain is lazy and it was immediately grateful for the fairly long list of criteria having been broken down into a process that I could go through any time, rather than principles that are less concrete.

The idea

With our team we went through an exercise to group the criteria into the different stages of the fast pass audit and that was incredibly helpful for us to understand what each of stage of the audit would entail. I think some sort of linking between the two would be valuable for many novice readers.

It would either be from the audit stages: "▶ Expand the list of relevant criteria in this phase "

Or from the criteria entries: "This criteria should be considered during the Keyboard Probing and Screen Reader Inspection phases of the fast pass audit"

Why?

In my view the workbook has a "usefulness dip" depending on the level of knowledge of the reader.

• Very useful for novices, who know of data experience a11y as a problem, but not a lot about how to get started actually solving some problems. These people will mostly use the fast pass audit part.
• Very useful for "experts", i.e. people who understand the implications of each criterion's descriptions. For them the workbook is a reminder, a structured summary of the actionable knowledge that's available and a list of links to dive deeper into sub-areas.
• However it is only somewhat useful for people with "intermediate knowledge" who have maybe already put considerable effort into learning about the topic so they know the basics. They understand everything the fast pass audit mentions but want to make sure that they cover all the bases in their evaluations. For them the process structure of the fast pass audit is very useful but they would already want to see the whole list of criteria they should be considering at each step even if they do not fully understand each of the requirements posed by them.

I hope what I wrote makes sense.

[frankelavsky]

Oh, this is a great suggestion! We are looking to really improve the workbook and main page over all too (organizationally). I agree that intermediate users aren't really well supported and so are the not-even-novices who just come to Chartability and are curious but really just want a super high level way to explore and look around.

At some point, hopefully before the year concludes, I'll be taking another serious pass of the architecture and organization of everything and I'll definitely be looking to incorporate this feedback.