How you view the data will depend on your goal and role.
For Unit Leaders: Getting an Overview of a Project
Use the project dashboard:
Home > Project link
This view provides you with a snapshot of the health of a single website. Issues are categorized by severity and by type.
The simple graph in the severity categorization will let you know if the health of your site is improving. In the Sample Project below there has been no change.
The score works as follows:
-
Issues are categorized as Critical, Serious, Moderate or Minor.
-
Pages are categorized as Critical, Serious, Fair or Good based on the "worst" issue on the page. That is, if a page has one Critical issue, the page is Critical; one Serious issue, the page is Serious; one Moderate issue, the page is Fair; and if a page only contains Minor issues, it is Good.
-
The Project Score is based on Page categories and is calculated according the following formula:
(0.4*p2 + 0.8*p1 + p0)/ TP
where:
p2 = number of Serious pages
p1 = number of Fair pages
p0 = number of Good pages
TP = total pages
In other words, WorldSpace axe Monitor gives 40% for a page that has Serious issues, 80% for a page that has Moderate issues, 100% for pages with only Minor issues, and 0% for pages having Critical issues. (Since WorldSpace axe Monitor gives 0% for pages with critical issues there is no p3 in the formula.)
The categorization by type might help you decide what training your team needs. For example: if the lion’s share of the issues are flagged as color and contrast problems, you may want to provide your team documentation or training on that.
For Project Managers - Working with Issues
As the manager you will be monitoring site health, prioritizing fixes, organizing and assigning issues, deciding what issues are coming from the framework (WordPress, Drupal) and which from your content contributors, etc.
Organizing, Assigning, and Prioritizing Issues
Home > Project link > Issues
The filters in the Issues View are quite powerful. Once you have applied a filter you can tag all the issues in different ways.
You can for example - assign all color and contrast issues to one person:
- Filter by Issue Group: Color
- Select all and assign to someone (who needs to have an account and be part of the project)
You can also label issues via the same mechanism - select them and apply a new (or existing) label. This might be useful in project planning, for example (label as planned for Stage 2, Phase 4, etc.), or sort issues into those coming from the framework and those coming from content contributors (more on that on the Sorting Issues into CMS and content addendum).
Explore the options in the Action part of this mechanism. You may want to export a set of issues to Excel, set the priority, etc.
Selecting only issues that are clear violations might help you prioritize things as well (Severity: Violation). You can refine the results as well by choosing only critical issues (Priority: Critical) so that you are addressing the most important ones first. With both filters applied you will have a collection of clear critical violations.
Interpreting the Issues
You will want to know what they mean, decide how important they are to you and how to fix them.
What the Issue Means
The description column in the issues listing in the issues page provides a succinct explainer. Following the issue link will provide you with details about the issue, and following the help/information icon link will provide you with a link to documentation that your technical people will be able to use to fix the issue.
How to Prioritize the Issue
This depends on your needs and capacity. You cannot go wrong by tackling CMS issues first and content issues later, if you are using a CMS framework. You may also want to tackle the critical issues first. Both will exponentially improve the health of your web site with little effort.
You may also want to rank the issues by how many potential users may encounter it. If you have access logs you will be able to determine what pages receive the most traffic. You can then use the “URL contains” filter in the Issues page to select issues in those pages and label them as you see fit (“popular”, “high traffic”) to ensure that they receive the attention needed.
Who to Assign It to
This will depend on your particular situation. If you are using a CMS, assign CMS issues to CMS level developers (or the vendor if the CMS is vended). Content issues can be fixed by anyone, as they are usually quite simple, but should probably be assigned to the editors themselves.They will need information on how to fix it.
Fixing Issues
A key factor in being able to fix issues is understanding what they are and how to fix them.
How to Fix It
The following scenario is plausible:
-
A project member accesses the Issues page.
-
She filters to see what issues have been assigned to her and are still open.
-
For each issue:
-
She takes a look at the Element Source Code - if she is familiar with the web system this will be helpful in locating the issue
-
She reads the Description column to see why it is an issue.
-
She clicks on the Description column issue link to get more details, including what page (url) the issue was found.
-
She clicks on the Help/Information link (
) to see how to fix it. -
She fixes it, then sets the issue status to fixed (by choosing the Description column issue link and setting if to “Fixed”).
NOTE: if you check the box to select all issues before changing the status to fixed, it will update all issues, not just the ones listed on your current page.
-
But other workflows might work better for your team.
Note: the people providing the fix do not need an account in axe Monitor. If you export the issues assigned to them to Excel, they will be provided with the links to the same information provided by clicking in the Help/Information link ().
How to Verify the Fix
- Filter issues so that you end with a list of all the issues that have been closed.
- Export the list to Excel.
- Run a scan.
- Note which closed issues in the spreadsheet no longer appear in the Issues list of the new scan.