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Accessibility Planner Quickstart

This quickstart walks you through a first Accessibility Planner session: starting the agent, selecting frameworks, mapping success criteria, and handing off a backlog. The full agent reference lives in Accessibility Planner.

NOTE

The planner produces planning artifacts, not a conformance certification. Findings still require review by a qualified accessibility professional.

Prerequisites​

  • The Accessibility collection installed (see Collections).
  • A workspace with the product surfaces you intend to assess, or a PRD, BRD, RAI plan, or security plan to seed Phase 1.

Step 1: Start the planner​

Open the chat agent picker and select Accessibility Planner. The agent reads or creates state.json under .copilot-tracking/accessibility/{project-slug}/ and begins Phase 1 (Discovery).

If no upstream artifact exists, the planner enters capture mode and asks three to five focused questions per turn to build the surface inventory, audience scope, and regulatory drivers. If a PRD, BRD, RAI plan, or security plan exists, the matching entry mode pre-populates discovery and asks you to confirm the extracted values.

Step 2: Select frameworks​

At Phase 2, the planner presents the five supported frameworks as a multi-select, with wcag-22@AA and section-508 pre-checked as defaults:

  • wcag-22: WCAG 2.2 success criteria
  • aria-apg: ARIA Authoring Practices
  • coga: Cognitive Accessibility
  • section-508: Section 508 (Revised)
  • en-301-549: EN 301 549

Confirm the conformance level for each framework you keep, and record a reason for any framework you disable.

Step 3: Map success criteria​

In Phase 3, the planner maps your in-scope surfaces against the selected frameworks. Each success criterion resolves to a target compliance state with an evidence pointer. Criteria shared across frameworks emit cross-references so you map them once.

Step 4: Assess risk and evidence​

Phases 4 and 5 classify the plan-level risk tier and build the evidence register, tradeoff log, and work-item seeds. For each unresolved gap, you record either a mitigation or an accept-with-tradeoff decision.

Step 5: Hand off the backlog​

At Phase 6, the planner renders the work-item seeds into dual-format ADO and GitHub backlog files, attaches autonomy tiers, sanitizes content, and emits the planning disclaimer. Import the format that matches your tracking system.

Next Steps​

🤖 Crafted with precision by ✨Copilot following brilliant human instruction, then carefully refined by our team of discerning human reviewers.