Week of 9/21 - Development Standup Thread

[azdak]

6-Month Roadmap

Debug Reports Hung Scan Postmortem | Stale Blockers Analysis
Deployable Dev Docs Hardcoded Values Audit | Environment Variables by Service | AWS Resources List | Notes | Deployable v1 Feedback
Development Docs Equalify Semantic Versioning Doc

Dev Reports
March 6th | March 31st | April 5th | June 1st | July 7th | August 1st | Sept 1st

New/Discussion

• Error Explanation Sprint
  • Summary View
  • Detailed View
  • Add more helper text to Build Audit Screen
  • Add a dropdown-type solution to the Audit detailed view, allowing users to select and view previous/historical scans. When the user switches to a historical scan, the table should be populated with the iceboxed blockers from that scan. We should probably visually differentiate this view with a banner at the top of the table (or similar), and summary view and individual blocker pages will not be available in this mode.
• Promo deployable release?

Features

• Update docs with historical data

Bugs

Pending Next Roadmap Meeting

• Admin Tools Sprint

  • Audit Tagging: allow users to create, assign and filter by tags on audits (@azdak 9/14)
  • Discussion/Fit into roadmap (@azdak 3/16): Roll-up reporting, eg being able to get a summary view of several audits at once
  • Discuss expanding Blocker ignore status to more general user-settable tracking info (Needs Review, Ignore, etc)

• Email Notifications currently just act as a reminder, on a fixed schedule. (added by: @azdak 7/13)

  • Scheduled Email: Improve email content (add URL/Blocker count, summary content, etc)
  • Add "scan complete" email option?

• API Support

  • Not currently in roadmap
  • Would need alternate auth method (user-issued token, etc)
  • Would probably need data paging, rate limiting, or both to avoid impacting performance

Current/Assigned Work

@azdak To Dos:

• URL drilldown
• Optional LLM summary block
• Respond/Close out tickets
• Update tracking sheet
• Polish deployment docs
• Show current version on main/audits screen
• User-closable "updates" area?
• Issue export/integrations
  - to git, to...?)

@heythisischris To Dos:

• Connect Hub to main repo
  • Trey copied over the docs, Chris will now connect equalify-hub to point to this repo for dashboard instead.
• Add "Historical Scans" only to Detailed View
  • We will add a banner to the top indicating "Viewing data as of MM/DD/YYYY" and grey out the summary/recommendation views.
  • There will be a text link in the banner "Return to most recent scan" that easily lets people go back (we want to prevent novice confusion).
  • Add Icon/Text next to Download and Filter icons (add text for those as well).
  • Grey out ID column so users cannot click into details (it's technically a stale_blocker, which would complicate the system if we gave users access).
• Respond to Failed scan nukes existing blocker IDs #654 once we deploy most recent staging to prod (target Thurs Sep 17)?

Icebox

• Weird issue:
  • Scanner->results webhook can be:
    • OK
    • Error
    • but also Error ... Error ... OK
  • Means Count on errors is tricky/unclear to user: if I scan 50 pages, I could get 40 (or 80!) errors but still have 50 successful scans
  • Options
    • OK overrides/drops errors from table: drops data but simplest/does what it says UX. Is first try error data important?
    • No retry: simplest to understand but uh kinda counter to the goal, which is scanning
    • Retain but only show "final" errors in UX: most complete but not sure easiest way to implement
    • 5/11 - Try tying errors to a blocker ID, use the latest error. Update error depending on what's latest? Or array of errors? We'll figure this out.

Future

Current Feature Development Priority Order

Reviewed every 3rd Thursday | Feature Priority Sheet

Task	Tech Notes
Admin-settable co-brand logo	Allow admins to set a co-brand logo to appear alongside Equalify
Improve Blocker filter categories	Right now, we are mapping not very useful data to the Category fields, especially with PDFs. The goal here would be to identify the most useful data to map to categories
Show total blocker count on Audits screen
WebAIMee integration	Either integration with existing external WebAIMee service, or integrating this directly into Equalify. Would add LLM-based "How to Fix" information to individual blocker pages
FOSS/Infrastructure Sprint	Develop build scripts (with documentation) to more easily allow anyone to spin up an Equalify instance
PDF Link Source Tracking	Goal is for users to be able to identify which pages in an audit have PDF links, and the URL of those linked PDFs. Solution here would be adding functionality to CSV export (ie option to export CSV with "Pdf Url" & "Page Url" fields). Additionally, improve UX to make whole CSV export button/process clearer to users
Self-Registration	The idea here would be a public page for SSO installs, from which a user could enter email to request access. Approve/Deny option would then appear on the admin screen
Error Explanation Sprint	Develop clarity around reported accessibility blockers by improving a knowledge base, AI tooling, and integrating existing services like FAE. Included: axe-core / Vera explanation, blocker code, and most importantly is filtering labels (categories and tags), steps to remediate
Separating Template vs Content Blockers	Difficult problem, immediate way forward may be through expanding the new WP plugin
Design/Maintenance Sprint	Dashboard visual refresh and general code cleanup

Accessibility Audits

Scheduled Date	Audit Date	Results/Issues
No Later than 7/20	7/20	#641, #644
No Later than 10/27

Planned Sprint Details

FOSS Sprint aka Infrastructure Week (1-2 weeks)

• Determine IaC/Provisioning Framework (Terraform, OpenTofu, whatever): there are a variety of options for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and we need to look at the tradeoffs for each and settle on one
• Create BUILD SCRIPTS 💀: Write IaC scripts to provision all the infrastructure-ie lambdas, DB, and relationships between them- needed to run an Equalify instance
• Determine deployment strategy: Figure out how to handle deployment, ie how code (and code updates) are pushed to the provisioned infrastructure
• Provisioning & Deployment Documentation: Technical documentation for deployment
• User Documentation: Developer-focused Readme to introduce how to use the app from a high level.

Design & Maintenance Sprint (1-2 weeks)

• Get alignment on overall visual direction and palette
• Branding: Defining how branding is handled on the system.
• Design System: Atomic system or Storybook for component uniformity
• Darkmode 😎
• Mobile breakpoints
• Style and Code Cleanup: Finish componentizing, minimize global styles, and code cleanup
• Promo materials
  • Needs discussion

Onboard Features Sprint (1-2 weeks)

• Site onboarding features
  • Lambda for site crawling
  • Integrate onboarding features into Build Audit
• Allow external, linked CSVs as basis for Audit URLs (with regular or just-in-time on-scan re-scrapes), allowing WordPress plugin integration
• CSV User import

Backlog/Blocked

• Help text first pass
  • ID icon areas
  • Refactor HelperTooltip component
  • Write help text
• Integrate error reporting into "blockers over time" scans table (also possibly the graph?)
• Discussion/Fit into roadmap (@azdak 3/16): the eternal Custom Rules question
• Discussion/Fit into roadmap (@azdak 3/16): the even more eternal "exclude the CMS header/footer" question 😄