Week of 6/15 - Development Standup Thread

[azdak]

6-Month Roadmap

Hung Scan Postmortem
Stale Blockers Analysis
Hardcoded Values Audit | Environment Variables by Service | AWS Resources List | Notes
Equalify Semantic Versioning Doc

Dev Report - Period ending March 6th
Dev Report - Period ending March 31st
Dev Report - Period ending April 5th
Dev Report - Period ending June 1st

New/Discussion

• Docs issues
• FOSS Deployment Sprint
  • Determine IaC/Provisioning Framework (Terraform, OpenTofu, whatever): there are a variety of options for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and we need to look at the tradeoffs for each and settle on one
  • Create BUILD SCRIPTS 💀: Write IaC scripts to provision all the infrastructure-ie lambdas, DB, and relationships between them- needed to run an Equalify instance
  • Determine deployment strategy: Figure out how to handle deployment, ie how code (and code updates) are pushed to the provisioned infrastructure
  • Provisioning & Deployment Documentation: Technical documentation for deployment
  • User Documentation: Developer-focused Readme to introduce how to use the app from a high level.

Features

Bugs

Pending Next Roadmap Meeting

Current Work

@azdak To Dos:

• Basic darkmode
• Fix lag in Audit Summary view
• Replace hover pip/marker in Audit table for non-scanned days to have more visual distinction
• Initial terraform scripts (waiting on new testing env)

@heythisischris To Dos:

• Issue 628 followup
• Weird issue:
  • Scanner->results webhook can be:
    • OK
    • Error
    • but also Error ... Error ... OK
  • Means Count on errors is tricky/unclear to user: if I scan 50 pages, I could get 40 (or 80!) errors but still have 50 successful scans
  • Options
    • OK overrides/drops errors from table: drops data but simplest/does what it says UX. Is first try error data important?
    • No retry: simplest to understand but uh kinda counter to the goal, which is scanning
    • Retain but only show "final" errors in UX: most complete but not sure easiest way to implement
    • 5/11 - Try tying errors to a blocker ID, use the latest error. Update error depending on what's latest? Or array of errors? We'll figure this out.
• Work on DB Schema version control and Hasura metadata version control
  • Include in CI/CD
• Work on semantic releases, add Releases to Hub / We should probably settle on a versioning system/strategy going forward! (Added 4/29, on @heythisischris's list)
  • Something like semantic-versioning might be easiest. Would mean standardizing commit message format
  • Need to document any new system
  • Should also surface current version to UI somewhere
  • Here's the doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FFPwGAsOmYaLbjB5deKncV24EQSkg7m02T4rY3co89Y/edit?usp=sharing
• Migrate frontend to Vite 8.0 (Rust backed deployments!)
• Add Hono framework to backend API
• Add PDF Link Source Tracking in Equalify #618
  • Goal is for users to be able to identify which pages in an audit have PDF links, and the URL of those linked PDFs. Solution here would be adding functionality to CSV export (ie option to export CSV with "Pdf Url" & "Page Url" fields). Additionally, improve UX to make whole CSV export button/process clearer to users(confirmed 5/27 - DASE Meeting)
• Add deprecation notice to Equalify Reflow WordPress Plugin
• Fix bug: Unknown URL showing in scan results #633

@heythisischris Icebox

• Get clean AWS account provisioned (talk to Dean)
• (proposed 1/22) Fix URL for prod Hasura
• Coordinate meeting w/ Helen & Michael on documentation workflow AND ask about how Equalify communications are handled, what team is responsible, and how we can properly coordinate updates / FAQ / etc.

Future

Current Feature Development Priority Order

Reviewed every 3rd Thursday | Feature Priority Sheet

Task	Tech Notes
Admin-settable co-brand logo	Allow admins to set a co-brand logo to appear alongside Equalify
Improve Blocker filter categories	Right now, we are mapping not very useful data to the Category fields, especially with PDFs. The goal here would be to identify the most useful data to map to categories
Show total blocker count on Audits screen
WebAIMee integration	Either integration with existing external WebAIMee service, or integrating this directly into Equalify. Would add LLM-based "How to Fix" information to individual blocker pages
FOSS/Infrastructure Sprint	Develop build scripts (with documentation) to more easily allow anyone to spin up an Equalify instance
PDF Link Source Tracking	Goal is for users to be able to identify which pages in an audit have PDF links, and the URL of those linked PDFs. Solution here would be adding functionality to CSV export (ie option to export CSV with "Pdf Url" & "Page Url" fields). Additionally, improve UX to make whole CSV export button/process clearer to users
Self-Registration	The idea here would be a public page for SSO installs, from which a user could enter email to request access. Approve/Deny option would then appear on the admin screen
Error Explanation Sprint	Develop clarity around reported accessibility blockers by improving a knowledge base, AI tooling, and integrating existing services like FAE. Included: axe-core / Vera explanation, blocker code, and most importantly is filtering labels (categories and tags), steps to remediate
Separating Template vs Content Blockers	Difficult problem, immediate way forward may be through expanding the new WP plugin
Design/Maintenance Sprint	Dashboard visual refresh and general code cleanup

Planned Sprint Details

FOSS Sprint aka Infrastructure Week (1-2 weeks)

• Determine IaC/Provisioning Framework (Terraform, OpenTofu, whatever): there are a variety of options for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and we need to look at the tradeoffs for each and settle on one
• Create BUILD SCRIPTS 💀: Write IaC scripts to provision all the infrastructure-ie lambdas, DB, and relationships between them- needed to run an Equalify instance
• Determine deployment strategy: Figure out how to handle deployment, ie how code (and code updates) are pushed to the provisioned infrastructure
• Provisioning & Deployment Documentation: Technical documentation for deployment
• User Documentation: Developer-focused Readme to introduce how to use the app from a high level.

Design & Maintenance Sprint (1-2 weeks)

• Get alignment on overall visual direction and palette
• Branding: Defining how branding is handled on the system.
• Design System: Atomic system or Storybook for component uniformity
• Darkmode 😎
• Mobile breakpoints
• Style and Code Cleanup: Finish componentizing, minimize global styles, and code cleanup
• Discussion/Fit into roadmap (@azdak 3/16): Roll-up reporting, eg being able to get a summary view of several audits at once
• Discussion/Fit into roadmap (@azdak 3/16): user<->audit groups and/or more fine-grained control over what each user sees on the audit listing page

Onboard Features Sprint (1-2 weeks)

• Site onboarding features
  • Lambda for site crawling
  • Integrate onboarding features into Build Audit
• Allow external, linked CSVs as basis for Audit URLs (with regular or just-in-time on-scan re-scrapes), allowing WordPress plugin integration
• CSV User import

Backlog/Blocked

• Help text first pass
  • ID icon areas
  • Refactor HelperTooltip component
  • Write help text
• Integrate error reporting into "blockers over time" scans table (also possibly the graph?)
• Discussion/Fit into roadmap (@azdak 3/16): the eternal Custom Rules question
• Discussion/Fit into roadmap (@azdak 3/16): the even more eternal "exclude the CMS header/footer" question 😄