Accessibility results, uninvited

Auto-enabling accessibility scans on ordinary test runs puts a11y results in front of teams who never asked for them — value realization and lead generation in one move. The design problem: presenting an uninvited, deliberately lightweight scan honestly, inside a dashboard built for a different job.

Problem

A sample scan is not a compliance audit. Showing auto-generated a11y results next to a team's functional tests risks two failures at once — overselling (the team believes they're covered when the scan is partial) and clutter (the team resents results they didn't request on a surface they rely on daily).

Where it leads

This is research work — it ends in open threads, not outcomes. They're below, stated plainly.

The research mapped the existing accessibility product’s mature use-case hierarchy — from listing scanned tests, through issue drill-downs, to trend analytics — against the functional dashboard’s information architecture, to find where auto-enabled results could live without colonizing the surface.

The integration shape under exploration: a scoped summary on the busy surface, with the full experience one deliberate hop away.

The finding I’d defend anywhere: an uninvited result must introduce itself. The card leads with what was scanned and what wasn’t — sampled pages, a subset of rules — before it shows a single count. Trust survives partial coverage; it does not survive discovered partial coverage.

Open threads

The honesty spec is drafted but unproven: every surfaced result must carry its scope — a sample, not a compliance audit — without burying the value under disclaimers.
Placement is unresolved: a11y results as a build-level tab compete for the exact real estate the SDK nudges initiative fought over.
The lead-gen tension is live: the same card is both genuine user value and a trial funnel — the design must be defensible if a user reads it cynically.
Performance cost of auto-scans is a product gate, not a design one — but the design owes users visibility into it if it lands.

The full walkthrough — screens, numbers, names — happens in conversation. Start one →