There are many different ways to test and monitor accessibility, from automated scanning to manual expert analysis. Businesses worldwide also host endless content types, from static websites to interactive applications and everything in between. Many organizations utilize multiple analysis types on different assets at different times, and struggle to put all that data together in a meaningful way.
ARC Workspaces can assist with structuring all this content. It’s a collaborative area inside ARC where your program and project teams can conduct and monitor User Flow testing, find project deliverables and reports, and organize multiple engagements.
What differentiates Workspaces?
ARC Workspaces offers an entirely new approach. Instead of focusing on the type of analysis you want to do, Workspaces allow you to group your testing projects and the data from them in a way that reflects your own processes and organization.
What’s new in GEN-5?
We’ve improved Workspaces with ARC’s GEN-5 latest release. Now you can create a Workspace for a product group and add the product team as members. There they can analyze and remediate everything they are responsible for.
Likewise, pull all the websites and applications affected by an accessibility project into a single Workspace to compare results and prioritize efforts accordingly. Workspaces are endlessly flexible and easy to use. Simply add your Workspace, choose what you want to test and how and start adding members. Try it for yourself today by signing up for a FREE ARC account.
Here are a couple of sample scenarios to illustrate just how versatile this new feature is:
Multi-banner Hotel Group
A large hotel group with multiple brands arranges each of those portfolios into its own Workspace. This way, owners can each take responsibility for their brand while the organization as a whole can see roll-up data and apply policies and standards as needed.
In the screenshot below, one of these Workspaces is open, and we can see a combination of website scans and User Flows. The workspace is monitoring three branded websites along with key user sequences, such as the booking process. Different kinds of accessibility testing go on at varied frequencies, but all testing rolls up into comparable scores and visualizations.
On the Workspace dashboard, ARC subscribers with access to the Workspace can compare progress across all of the included properties and quickly focus on the worst offenders. Monitoring key User Flows closely means the team can spot any issues that might interrupt critical processes while also keeping an eye on longer-term initiatives.
A University
Universities usually have a vast array of digital content in just about every form imaginable, from complex applications providing student services to blogs, websites, apps, and e-learning platforms. There is simply no way to monitor all of this (much less keep an inventory of what and where it is) so accessibility has to be broken down into manageable chunks.
In this scenario, the university has put all of its schools into a single Workspace and carried out detailed accessibility audits on each. From the audits, they have set up test initiatives with target dates and policies. The test initiatives define when and to what degree all of the accessibility issues identified should be fixed.
As the schools work on the issues raised in the audits, they can monitor the sites to ensure the initiatives are progressing. Any slowdown or reversal in progress from one scan to the next might indicate that a team has not understood an audit report or needs training.
These are just a couple of examples of how organizations might use Workspaces to group related assets and projects. They can recreate their own structures inside ARC to manage responsibilities or set up programs and initiatives for accessibility.