How Entrepreneur Media Cut Digital Accessibility Administration Time by 50 Percent

• Entrepreneur Media aims to provide best-in-class experiences for every visitor. Yet, hefty manual processes initially limited the team’s progress on digital accessibility.
• The developer leading the brand’s accessibility effort spent entire days manually passing test results across disconnected systems, leaving little time to implement fixes.
• Entrepreneur Media streamlined remediation by transitioning to the fully integrated Level Access Platform. With the platform’s workflow management tools, the team could easily identify high-priority findings, group them into trackable projects, and monitor completion at a glance.
• Altogether, the Level Access Platform helped Entrepreneur Media reduce the time spent on manual work by 50 percent.
• The platform’s intuitive design and reporting dashboards helped onboard others to monitor and manage accessibility across the organization, supporting Entrepreneur Media’s commitment to creating inclusive experiences for all users.
• Thanks largely to efficiencies gained from the platform, Entrepreneur Media addressed 60 percent of the findings from its most recent site evaluation in just three months, more than two times faster than prior attempts.

With 45 years developing digital, print, and streaming media content for the celebrated Entrepreneur brand, Entrepreneur Media understands the importance of delivering best-in-class user experiences. And with help from Level Access, the team is sustaining web accessibility to ensure usability for every visitor.

When Entrepreneur Media first set out to improve the accessibility of its complex website, however, the team confronted a common challenge: limited time. Just one employee, Front-end Engineer Lorena Brito, managed Entrepreneur Media’s accessibility efforts. And her hours were consumed by manually documenting and triaging test findings for remediation. “I would spend entire days just creating Jira tickets to distribute and track tasks for resolving accessibility issues,” says Brito.

This high volume of manual work took valuable time away from fixing bugs. Without an easy-to-use hub for reporting on accessibility, it was difficult for Brito to share responsibility across the Entrepreneur Media team. “If I didn’t know about an accessibility problem, no one did,” she says. “Even if they did, no one apart from me really knew how to interpret and apply the information in the tool.”

To accelerate Entrepreneur Media’s progress and deliver on their organization-wide commitment to accessibility, the company needed a streamlined and intuitive system for managing accessibility.

Shortly after adopting the Level Access Platform, Brito found she could triage accessibility issues much more efficiently. The platform’s workflow management tools enabled Brito to quickly identify and group high-priority findings (such as critical accessibility issues or issues in new content) and add them to projects in the platform. This made it easy for her to ensure the most important fixes were implemented first and monitor completion. “I got so much valuable time back,” notes Brito.

Additionally, the platform provided contextual tips and guidance for resolving each finding, which helped developers better understand how to avoid repeating the same accessibility errors in future projects. And with the platform’s accessibility health score—a holistic metric that indicates the overall accessibility of websites and individual web pages—she had a simple way to measure the impact of her work.

The platform is designed to be easy to use for all team members within an organization, and it empowered other stakeholders at Entrepreneur Media to stay informed about accessibility progress. For example, Entrepreneur Media’s Chief Technical Officer, Jake Hudson, began using the platform to check the team’s high-level performance. “Our CTO told me that he knows the work is getting done because he accesses up-to-date analytics directly in the platform,” says Brito. “That’s important to building trust and further growing our program.”

Thanks largely to the platform’s workflow management tools, Brito estimates that she now spends 50 percent less time on administrative tasks than she did before implementing the solution. She can devote this time to managing Entrepreneur Media’s expanding accessibility function. When several new employees joined what was previously a one-woman initiative, Brito had capacity to guide and mentor her colleagues.

With both new technology and new team members, “accessibility improved by leaps and bounds,” says Brito. In roughly three months, Entrepreneur Media was able to address 60 percent of the findings from its latest comprehensive evaluation more than two times faster than prior attempts. And as its site’s accessibility improves, so has its overall performance: web content loads faster, and users spend more time reading articles and browsing the home page. Company leaders are taking note: Entrepreneur Media’s accessibility success was spotlighted in the organization’s monthly newsletter.

As the impact of accessibility becomes clear to the broader organization, accessibility is no longer a siloed priority for Brito and other developers. Designers ask for accessibility reviews of new components. Social media managers ask about the color contrast in graphics. Members of the editorial staff ask her about best practices for accessible hyperlinks. “As an organization, we’re collectively understanding the importance of accessibility,” reflects Brito. “Now, it’s not just me doing the work—it’s the team doing the work, together, in a single system—the Level Access Platform—that supports efficiency and collaboration.”