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September 16, 2025

Advancing Accessibility: A New Dashboard for Tracking Progress

The ADA Digital Accessibility Initiative (DAI) ensures that UW’s digital content is accessible, providing equal information, interactions, and services to people with disabilities. Additionally, the Initiative is leading UW’s work to comply with Department of Justice regulations by April 2026 and setting up the mechanisms to ensure accessible content thereafter.

To support this Initiative, the ADA Digital Accessibility Compliance Progress dashboard is now available to track implementation and monitor digital accessibility compliance by:

  • Improving leadership access to clear, relevant digital accessibility data.
  • Highlighting areas with challenges that may increase risk.
  • Providing a consistent but flexible source of progress data to support data-driven decision-making for training, resources, and other institution-wide support.

This dashboard highlights key metrics such as accessibility scores, common website accessibility issues, opportunities for improvement in video captioning, and overall compliance with accessibility standards over time.

Collaborating to Meet Requirements

Creating this dashboard was a team effort! Staff from the Civil Rights Compliance Office and UW-IT’s Accessible Technology Services team defined the requirements and provided feedback, while UW-IT’s Web Applications and Business Intelligence (BI) teams built the data pipeline, developed the dashboard, and refined it through testing.

About the Data

This dashboard reflects data from the following sources:

  • DubBot – An automated website accessibility checker that runs more than 100 checks on web pages and provides feedback to site owners. It also flags broken links, spelling errors, compliance issues with governance policies, and search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. For more information, refer to DubBot Web Accessibility Checker.
  • UW YouTube Caption Reports – These reports help YouTube channel owners monitor and improve the accessibility of their videos. They are generated by the YouTube Caption Auditor (YTCA), which is an open-source tool developed by UW-IT’s Accessible Technology Services. For additional information about how to caption videos, refer to the Captions.

About the Dashboard

The ADA Digital Accessibility Compliance Progress dashboard answers key questions with the following four visualizations.

Website Compliance Progress

This visualization shows digital accessibility score trends for the selected Unit, compared to the baseline of UW Core Sites within the chosen date range.

Accessibility scores are generated by DubBot, which monitors websites for specified accessibility issues, including Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) criteria. Score changes reflect progress, but a high score does not guarantee full compliance.

An example screenshot of the Website Compliance Progress visualization.

Website Accessibility Scores

This table displays digital accessibility scores for UW websites filtered by the selected Unit and sorted by score. This helps identify sites that may need remediation support.

This section also displays the total number of sites for the selected unit. Use the Number of Rows dropdown to choose how many sites to display. By default, the table shows 5 sites.

An example screenshot of the Website Accessibility Scores visualization.

Website Accessibility Issues

This bar chart displays common web content accessibility issues, filtered by the selected Unit and sorted by number of occurrences. It helps users to prioritize fixes with the greatest impact for their Unit.

Use the WCAG Level filter to view issues by WCAG 2.1 conformance level (A, AA, AAA). By default, A and AA issues are shown, as these must be addressed for ADA compliance.

An example screenshot of the Website Accessibility Issues visualization.

Video Captions by YouTube Channel(s) and Scan Date

This trend line shows the percentage of captioned videos over time for the selected channel, compared to the average for all UW YouTube videos. Because captions are required for ADA compliance, it helps identify channels with videos that need captioning.

Use the Channel Name and Scan Date Range filters to explore captioning performance for specific content owners, teams, or time periods.

An example screenshot of the Video Captions by YouTube Channel(s) and Scan Date visualization.

Access Information

The Civil Rights Compliance Office manages access to this dashboard via a UW Group.

To request access, email ada504@uw.edu and include “Access Request: ADA Digital Accessibility Compliance Progress” in the subject line.

Questions?

If you have questions about this dashboard or would like to inquire about a similar solution for your department, please contact help@uw.edu with “BI Portal Dashboards” in the subject line.