SCI Solutions (dissolved in 2023) was a department of R1 RCM specializing in customized web surveys, consent documents, and participant portals for clinical and healthcare product research studies. These products were all built through its proprietary DatStat Illume and DatStat Connect platforms. Prominent clients included St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Philips, and COPD Foundation.
Challenge
A major client, “X”, required a series of surveys and participant portals for their upcoming flu and COVID-19 studies. These were large-scale, national studies that required strict adherence to federal accessibility standards (Section 508/WCAG AAA). However, the off-the-shelf Connect software was built to a less stringent standard. My official role was Web Developer, and back-end software changes could only be made by an external engineering team. But the team would need to make changes in order to build an accessible survey, and to comply with contractual obligations to client “X” .
Process
I used axe DevTools to examine each page in existing surveys and participant portals, documenting all errors and warnings in a spreadsheet. I captured details about the errors such as severity, location, and frequency, and I identified items that could be fixed by software configuration or front-end code changes. These included CSS contrast or responsiveness issues, improvements to aria attributes, making field labels and error message more descriptive, and changing layouts to improve display when using enlarged fonts. Then, I identified items that would need to be addressed by the engineering team.
Next, I engaged stakeholders from client “X” and presented my findings, along with suggested solutions and estimates for development time. The stakeholders gave me feedback regarding priority of fixing each error type.
Then, based on this feedback, I documented the changes that would need to be made with as much detail as possible, and in order of priority.
Solution
Because DatStat Connect typically released back-end product updates only once or twice per quarter, I made sure to deliver my recommendations to them promptly, to ensure that the engineering team could build and test all the updates in time for their next scheduled release. Then, I made all front-end development changes, working in priority order as agreed upon with the client, and verified the fixes using the axe DevTools plugin. Finally, I created a comprehensive best-practices document, which could be used as reference for all front-end developers on the team.
This work not only solved the problem of meeting our contractual obligations with client “X”; it also ensured that survey and participant portal products would be compliant with the strictest government standards for all future clients, and that our study solutions would be accessible, usable and inclusive for all.