App Updates: 2021 Review & 2022 Roadmap

A wise person once told me that a surefire way to stay motivated on goals is to talk about them with others, so I started drafting this post to reflect on what was achieved in 2021 and set my sights on some goals for 2022. I had grand ambitions of posting somewhere around the new year but you know how that often goes, so I’m settling for posting while it’s still early in the first quarter.

Reflecting on the progress of 2021

I read through emails, notes, Jira tickets, and commit messages in preparation for this, wanted to remind myself of what was accomplished last year. Turns out, it’s more than I remembered! I think that’s the greatest benefit to this kind of reflection, I’m often surprised at the totality of it all and feel better about progress made.

Here are some highlights:

• After nearly a year working through some major feature additions and addressing early feedback, Be Inclusive moved out of beta in late February.
• Soon thereafter a whole new color theme was added providing the often requested dark mode support.
• A blog was added – where you’re reading this! – to continue sharing longer form updates and musings about all things accessibility.
• Visualization Tables were added to the audit report page to help refine the discoverability and visualization aspect of observations by displaying them in a sortable and filterable table format.
• Speaking of the audit report, several refinements were added throughout the year to that page as well including the criteria stats breakdown and overall percentage passed.
• While it wasn’t released until January 2022 I want to also mention the report section visibility options and passcode protection added giving greater control over what is displayed.

Planning for 2022

With nearly 3 years of development effort going into this app, a majority of which towards the overall audit functionality, I feel it’s time to focus more on other areas that would benefit users in different ways. Here’s the top focuses for 2022:

• Translations – I’m setting my sights on Dutch, French, and Spanish initially. If you’re interested in helping with these or any other languages for you and your users please do reach out!
• Content – I’m going to devote more time to expanding the knowledge base and for more accessibility-related blogging.
• WCAG 2.2 – I’ll soon add support for WCAG 2.2 to coincide with its completion around June. Also starting to consider how to address WCAG 3 once that’s released too!
• Audit trends – Identifying helpful trends to surface in audit reports once more than one audit is completed. Trying to answer questions like “How’d we improve?” and “What can we do better for next time?”

My hope is that a strengthened knowledge base, added translations, and continued refinement & support of the core audit and reporting functionality will keep Be Inclusive front of mind for all your audit reporting needs. If you have any feedback or additional feature requests please do get in touch, we appreciate and truly consider every bit we receive. In fact, a majority of the enhancements and additions made in 2021 came from user feedback!

Thanks for all the support in 2021, looking forward to what we can accomplish in 2022 and beyond!