Summary:A brief history of Pope Tech’s scanning platform, where it is at today and a look forward to future roadmap features.
This roadmap is outdated, our updated 2020 roadmap has been published.
A look back at how we got here
Having a Scanning Platform has been a dream of ours at Pope Tech for years and it was a goal of WebAIM to have something like this powered by WAVE for even longer. We started discussing this in earnest with WebAIM in 2016 and created a plan to partner together. Once we had a mutual agreement it took another year to work things out with legal to get the agreement finalized. The partnership was officially announced in November of 2017. Before the announcement we had started working on the infrastructure for the platform but weren’t able to go full throttle until we had an official agreement in place.
Afterwards we sought alpha and beta users, received feedback, iterated and created an initial feature set to roll out to customers. Our first users were added beginning of April 2018.
The state of Pope Tech scanning on June 19, 2018
Today, our scanning platform is a working product with paying customers. We have an initial feature set that is already providing value, and helping organizations improve their web accessibility posture. If interested you can schedule a demo today.
We are improving it and adding new features such as our update last week. We haven’t announced our official release yet though as we are completing some UX updates to be fully accessible ourselves. Our platform was built with accessibility in mind but there are some libraries and polishing that we know we still need to do. As part of this WebAIM will audit the platform for accessibility. This will be completed summer of 2018 and we will announce our official release shortly thereafter.
Current features that are being used by customers today:
- Flexible group hierarchy
- Roles and permissions tied to groups
- Crawl, and scan websites
- Powered by WAVE
- Dashboard of accessibility status
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- Summary of errors, alerts, contrast errors, features, infrastructure and Aria
- Errors, alerts over time
- Compare group errors and contrast errors
- Drill down to specific errors or filter by websites or groups
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- Combine websites or groups for reports
- Email reports out from system
- Schedule recurring scans
- Automatically send email reports of scheduled scans
Pope Tech Impactful Roadmap
This roadmap is outdated, our updated 2020 roadmap has been published.
We have received positive feedback with what we have and also great feedback from what organizations want to see. We are always interested in feedback, we won’t promise we will always do it, but if it makes sense we will add it our roadmap. For all new features we consider how it will affect the ease of use. We want to make sure our platform stays approachable and easy to use for users with different backgrounds. A new feature is also considered on its impact on improving accessibility with how many organizations would use it and how much of an improvement it will make.
There are other features, updates, and interface improvements that we will be doing that aren’t on the list below. This is a list of impactful features that are on our current roadmap.
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Developer summary inside of the Platform(completed Sep 12th)- Code line and summary of issue on page level report view
Accessibility tips(completed Sep 12th)- Tips created by WebAIM next to alerts and errors on how to fix, why it matters, which WCAG policy that corresponds
Shibboleth Single Sign on integration(completed Dec 2018)- Integrate into Shibboleth
- Role based reporting
- Role for content editor, designer, developer, audit and executive
- Customized dashboards and reports for each role
Reporting by region(in Beta)- Flag parts of a page as the template and part as content, ability to only show the issues of content to a content editor and template to developer role
- Rescan by report
- Rescan all pages that correspond to any report in the dashboard, allows a user to rescan just a subset after remediation
- HTML reporting
- One time pad unique url to easily view and share reports/dashboards that can be included in email reports. Nerd talk for a secure way to share a dashboard that only those with the link can access. The person who the report is shared with will not have to log in
- Impact dashboard widget
- Optional impact widget in the dashboard including if it is likely a template issue
- Organization standards
- Set a standard for any Accessibility KPI and receive notifications when regression happens
- Broken links checking during crawl
- API for CMS integration
Anything you see that is missing? Or is one of our roadmap items something you would be interested in? Join the conversation on Twitter for any feedback or comments.