A Look Back at LogicGate’s 2024 Annual Agility User Conference
In March we hosted our annual Agility User Conference in Chicago gathering hundreds of Compliance, Cybersecurity and Risk…
As a governance, risk, and compliance leader (GRC), you already know the value of building a culture of risk at your organization. Risk management is everyone’s job, meaning your choice of GRC software can either accelerate your program initiatives – or block them.
At LogicGate, we understand that annual risk assessments are often the most far-reaching and visible thing you do. That’s why we’re doubling down on platform accessibility and user experience (UX) to ensure everyone at your organization is enabled and empowered to contribute to your GRC program goals.
We sat down with Shannon Harrison, LogicGate’s Senior Director of User Experience, to learn why we’re making accessibility and UX improvements a strategic focus in the Risk Cloud® product roadmap. Here’s what she had to say.
Before building our accessibility roadmap, your team completed several rounds of UX and accessibility research to guide development. What did you learn?
Shannon: At the beginning of 2022, we partnered with Level Access, a leading digital accessibility solutions provider, to audit Risk Cloud for platform accessibility. The report uncovered several opportunities to improve, which our product team later prioritized and began remediating with help from our design and development teams. This was a big initiative that helped us raise our accessibility compliance and establish a standard moving forward as we continue to build features in Risk Cloud.
Why is platform accessibility so important – especially in B2B SaaS?
Shannon: Approximately one billion people worldwide live with a disability. Creating accessible digital platforms means we are building software that can be consumed and operated by anyone. Our goal is to empower our customers and users to own their GRC journey by using our software to help them achieve their goals. Providing equal access to our platform is imperative for our customers’ success. It allows all of our users to interact with our software in a meaningful way.
At LogicGate, we see risk management as a team sport. How does using an accessible GRC platform help teams build a culture of risk?
Shannon: Our customers are uniquely aware of the importance of managing risk and establishing compliance in their organizations. Selecting an accessible platform gives our customers the peace of mind that they’ve chosen a solution that will be available and usable by all of the individuals in their organization. An important pillar in building a culture of risk is being inclusive. Choosing a GRC platform partner who focuses on providing accessible software solutions aligns perfectly with that goal.
Tell us what you have planned to improve accessibility in Risk Cloud. What can users expect to see from your team in the upcoming months?
Shannon: Organizing the audit was the first step in helping us assess where we stood in WCAG compliance. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve worked hard to address issues and ensure that our platform becomes more accessible. At a high level, that sometimes means creating new reusable components that we can use everywhere within Risk Cloud.
Improvements we’ve made to improve accessibility include:
- Creating a new component for inline notifications, correcting status messages to help make users aware of important changes in content.
- Updating our icon set and adding text descriptions to icon images to clarify meaning and improve screen reader compatibility.
- Adding ARIA roles, states, and properties on content to meet accessibility standards and improve the content consumption experience when using assistive technology.
- Removing redundant ARIA roles, states, and properties.
- Aligning color use and contrast to WCAG standards to improve the platform experience.
- Providing proper labeling for dialogs and inputs to better support screen readers.
At a macro level, we continue to audit the platform and monitor our WCAG compliance. Long term, we will establish strategies for how to address accessibility at every stage of the Application build process through design, engineering, and quality assurance testing.
In addition to our remediation efforts and accessibility program development, we are also pursuing our VPAT, or Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. A VPAT document details how products meet the digital accessibility standards under Section 508, WCAG 2.0, WCAG 2.1, and the European standard EN 301 549.
Making Your GRC Program Accessible with Risk Cloud
Whether you’re currently growing your GRC program with Risk Cloud or just kicking off your first formal GRC initiative, it’s important to remember that your risk owners’ platform experiences – good, bad, or otherwise – directly impact your team’s success. By selecting a platform that’s easy to use, accessible, and collaborative, you and your team can save time, shorten audit cycles, and reallocate resources to more impactful work.