Now that we understand what accessibility debt is and how it affects your business, let's tackle the first practical step: measuring where you stand today.
Just like technical debt or financial debt, accessibility debt needs to be quantified before you can manage it effectively.
Setup your baseline
Before diving into metrics, you'll need to establish a baseline. This means conducting a thorough accessibility audit combining:
- Automated scans using tools like Axe or WAVE
- Manual testing with keyboard navigation and screen readers
- Reviews of key user journeys
- Feedback collection from users with disabilities
- Combing through your backlog for accessibility issues
Similar to financial or technical debt, accessibility debt metrics should measure both the principal (your existing issues) and the interest (the ongoing impact and growth of those issues). The goal is to quantify how accessibility debt affects development velocity, user experience and business outcomes.
KPIs to track
Once you've gathered the data, start tracking these key metrics:
- Accessibility Violation Count. This is the total number of WCAG violations identified in your product. It's your debt principal - the raw number of issues needing remediation. Track this by severity level (A, AA, AAA) to understand compliance gaps.
- Accessibility Bug Backlog. Beyond just violations, track how many accessibility-related bugs are sitting in your backlog. This includes issues reported by users, found in testing or discovered during development. The growth rate of this backlog indicates whether you're keeping up with your debt.
- Time to Fix Accessibility Issues. Track how long accessibility bugs remain open before you fix them. Also look at the issue age distribution. What percentage of issues are older than three months? Six months? A year? Long-lived issues indicate debt that's becoming harder to pay down.
- User-Reported Accessibility Issues. During testing, you probably won't catch any real-world issues. This is where direct feedback from users highlights comes in. Track both the number and the severity and impact of these reports. This is the human side of your debt.
- Accessibility Regression Rate. How often do fixed issues reappear in new releases? A high regression rate means your debt is compounding due to inadequate prevention measures. Track this to identify underlying process issues.
- Interest Accrual Rate. This measures how quickly small accessibility issues grow into larger problems. For example, an unlabeled button might initially affect just one page in your product, but as that component gets reused, the impact grows exponentially.
- Cost Escalation Factor. Track how much more expensive fixes become over time. A simple alt text issue might take five minutes to fix when you first identify it, but if left for months, it could require hours to untangle from other code changes.
This might seem like a lot. And it is. But you can't improve what you don't measure.
My process involves tracking these metrics and creating a debt register where I document each issue with:
- Description and location
- What WCAG success criteria it violates
- How it impacts the user
- How complex it is to fix (estimate)
- When I first noticed it and how long it probably existed for
Consistency is key when tracking accessibility debt. If you set up a regular schedule for measurements, you'll have an easier time identifying trends and progress. I advocate for automated scans as part of your CI/CD pipeline, manual testing for every release and quarterly comprehensive audit for the entire product.
It's better to integrate these into your existing processes rather than creating a separate workflow. You can at the very least add accessibility checks to design reviews, QA test plans and your definition of done criteria. Accessibility is a core part of product quality rather than a separate concern.
Visualise progress
You can't improve what you can't measure and you can't measure what you can't see.
So the next step is to create a very simple dashboard that shows these metrics and how they change over time. It's a little bit of an investment initially, and it pays off when you want to help stakeholders understand both the current state and trends of your accessibility debt.
Next time, we'll cover how to prioritise these issues once you've measured them. For now, focus on establishing your baseline measurement system.
**Hint: ** I like to start small so it doesn't feel too overwhelming. I pick the top three user journeys and just measure those to get a feel for the current accessibility debt.