Short answer to What is an accessibility dashboard?

[kestrell]

An accessibility dashboard is an accessibility evaluation tool which, like other dashboards, allows users to quickly access and understand metrics related to the accessiility of a website, a service, or even an institution.

Such a tool fulfills a variety of demands. First, as Sheri Byrne-Haber quotes Peter Drucker in her article
Measuring Accessibility Outcomes
https://sheribyrnehaber.com/measuring-accessibility-outcomes/

“you can’t manage what you can’t measure”

In this way, accessibility dashboards are typically used for both evaluation and for managing workflow.
The W3C Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools webpage
https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/
mentions A11gato as including an accessibility dashboard, and there are others.

However, the accessibility dashboard is now also being used to create more transparency and accountability in regard to the accessibility of public transportation systems, such as the
MTA Accessibility Dashboard
http://dashboards.mta.info/Help

As anyone who has a disability and has had to rely on paratransit knows, the promises of paratransits accessibility and the reality that has earned it nicknames such as "para-stranded" represents a gap reminiscent of the Grand Canyon, and so accessibility dashboards are becoming one method for providing both transparency and accountability.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Thank you for explaining these concepts!

Is the difference between a “dashboard” and a “report” that the dash provides real-time info, based on data (collected both manually and automatically).

[kestrell]

Basically, yes: the dashboard is not only up to date but, in the case of using it for managing workflow, it's also dynamic. It's also pure metrics, data, numbers, no interpretation or framing. In health care equity activism, we're always pushing for Medicare/Medicaid/Mass Health/Tufts/insurance companies to provide numbers, and trying to get them to provide dashboards is one of the ways we are trying to get them to provide transparency regarding disparities in health care. They acknowledge disparities are there, but they will fight you tooth and nail about sharing the numbers. I'm one of the people who often asks for more precise numbers when Mass health/Tufts are giving presentations, so I have personal experience with this.

Also: note how the lack of number re: how Covid-19 affects people with various disabilities, including respiratory disabilities such as cystic fibrosis, affected the prioritization of vaccines: heavy smokers are getting a high priority, most kinddds of disabilities, maybe or no priority, because no figures were kept of how they were affected by Covid.

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks! That made it through my foggy brain.

Yes, the lack of vital and relevant data for disabled people's experience with COVID is unconscionable.

One thing this pandemic has made clear: institutions are deadly.

[kestrell]

Even *before* the pandemic, the fact was that institutions, even rehab centers, were a major health threat for pwd. I learned this in the first few months I served on the disability policy committee, and this was why, when Alexx had his heart surgery right before the pandemic, I literally argued with the hospital rep that Alexx was *not* to be sent to a rehab center.

[bibliofile]

> Even *before* the pandemic, the fact was that institutions, even rehab centers, were a major health threat for pwd.

[adds yet another hour to the daily allotment of "run around like Munch's Scream" time]

[alexxkay]

Thanks again for that. Maybe saved my life...