ACP Decisions:
A focus on accessibility

Advanced Care Planning Decisions (ACP) is a healthcare company which produces educational content to help patients and their families make informed healthcare decisions. ACP and Setfive have been successful partners for several years.

As ACP's product matured and their clients became larger the accessibility of their web app became a key focus.

• Neither Setfive nor ACP had deep experience auditing WCAG accessibility standards, so we would need a partner to identify issues.
• The web app was built on Bootstrap 3.x which had several components with accessibility issues.
• ACP had a large volume of training materials, both video and text, prepared against the existing non-compliant UI. Keeping that material up to date with iterative changes presented a time-consuming and expensive challenge.

After evaluating several options with the ACP team we decided that the best approach was to upgrade the web app from Bootstrap 3 to Bootstrap 4 and address the accessibility issues during the upgrade. Additionally we worked with UsableNet to get automated and human feedback around the overall accessibility of the ACP web app.

• In version 4, the Bootstrap team resolved many accessibility issues that were present in version 3. This upgrade allowed ACP to make several of their components WCAG compliant "out of the box."
• By taking an "all or nothing" approach we were able to beta test the changes with select customers, resolve the issues which came up, and release the upgrade as one change. This allowed the ACP team to update their training materials once and clients to conduct one training on the upgraded platform.
• Using the UsableNet SaaS tool we were able to achieve a high level of compliance for the entire web app.

Tackling WCAG compliance was a new challenge for both Setfive and ACP. After completing the project, both teams have an appreciation for accessibility, and we plan to carry that forward for new development.