April 2026 Development Report

Reporting period: Mar 1 – Mar 31, 2026 Sources: #587, #593, #594, #595, #597 Contributors: T. Daniel, C. Aitken

Executive Summary

April continued Equalify's strong development momentum, with 26 tasks completed across 100 code commits and meaningful progress toward production readiness and operational maturity. Key accomplishments include the completion of the Remote CSV integration feature, a database infrastructure upgrade to support production workloads, selection of a crawling framework for site onboarding, and the establishment of formal standard operating procedures for service requests and support. The team also expanded the Equalify Hub with Reflow product documentation and a unified signup experience.

Highlights

• Completed the Remote CSV integration, enabling audits to pull URL lists from external CSV files, which supports WordPress plugin integration and streamlined site onboarding workflows
• Upgraded database infrastructure from a micro to a large instance, resolving a performance incident and ensuring stability under production-scale workloads
• Selected Sitemapper as the crawling framework for upcoming site onboarding capabilities, establishing the technical direction for automated URL discovery
• Established formal operational procedures, including a Service Request SOP and support systems documentation, to support the platform's growing user base
• Expanded the Equalify Hub with comprehensive Reflow technical documentation, product-specific signup flows, and direct waitlist synchronization with Campaign Monitor

Key Metrics

Completed Work

Team

• Added documentation specifying the rulesets used by the veraPDF and axe-core scanning engines.
• Optimized the summary view backend queries to resolve performance bottlenecks experienced on large audits.

T. Daniel

• Completed the Remote CSV integration feature, including: adding a remote CSV field to audits, incorporating CSV configuration into the audit builder, fetching and parsing remote CSVs at scan time with error handling, merging imported URLs with existing audit URLs while preserving URL IDs, updating the audit screen to display URLs from the last scan, and indicating external CSV mode with an editable CSV URL.
• Replaced custom-styled filter controls in the Blockers Table (Active/Ignore and HTML/PDF) with standard select boxes for improved visual consistency and simplified future restyling.
• Created a Service Request standard operating procedure.
• Reviewed user documentation prepared by Amanda and provided technical notes.
• Completed the accessibility survey.

C. Aitken

• Investigated and resolved production email deliverability issues reported during testing.
• Fixed rate-limit issues in the Equalify Hub.
• Increased AWS soft quotas for Lambda concurrency, SQS, and database size in preparation for production rollout, and added WAF rate-limit configuration.
• Established sensible platform constraints, such as limits of 10,000 URLs per audit and 10,000 audits per user.
• Clarified the "Teams" section in the user roles documentation, which was causing confusion between the concept of a team feature and references to the Equalify instance itself.
• Resolved the blank screen issue reported by a user, which was traced to resources reaching their configured limits.
• Evaluated crawling framework options and selected Sitemapper as the solution for site onboarding.

Notable Events

• Mar 3 (C. Aitken): On Friday, February 27, 2026, the team experienced degraded performance on the Equalify database. Core indexing issues were identified and resolved, and the database was upgraded from a t4g.micro instance to an m8g.xlarge instance to prevent future performance degradation under production workloads.
• Mar 24 (T. Daniel): Identified and addressed inefficient database queries in the audit summary view that were causing performance bottlenecks on large scans. The queries were rewritten to improve response times.
• Mar 25 (B. Bertuccelli-Booth): Identified the need for a formal standard operating procedure around support requests, which was subsequently created.
• Mar 31 (B. Bertuccelli-Booth): Helen and B. Bertuccelli-Booth met to align on documentation workflow and communications, establishing a path forward. The team can now proceed with reviewing the agreed-upon plan rather than scheduling additional coordination meetings.

Risks & Blockers

• Database schema version control: Version control for the database schema and Hasura metadata has been implemented manually, but requires integration with CI/CD.
• Production Hasura URL misconfiguration: The production URL for Hasura still references equalifyapp.com instead of equalify.uic.edu- could present a CORS issue. We will migrate the domain.

In Progress & Upcoming

Development

• Complete testing for the Remote CSV integration feature and merge into the main branch. (C. Aitken)
• Include the CSV integration in the CI/CD pipeline. (C. Aitken)
• Add sort functionality (including "Sort by Last Opened") to the Audits listing table. (T. Daniel)
• Fix the WordPress plugin based on the completed technical review. (T. Daniel)
• Investigate and resolve audit URLs displaying as UUIDs instead of readable addresses. (C. Aitken)
• Build a Chrome extension prototype. (C. Aitken)
• Improve the loading state for the summary view on large scans to provide better user feedback while data is being processed.
• Add wiki-style descriptive content to individual blocker pages, potentially maintained in an open-source repository.
• Add URL count to chart tooltips and the scans table.
• Add the UIC logo to the platform interface.
• Develop the crawl module, including a crawl button in the audit builder, a Lambda function for crawling via Sitemapper, an API endpoint, and a toggleable URL table in the audit builder.
• Verify that the email delivery fix is working correctly in production. (C. Aitken)

Operations

• Correct the production URL configuration for Hasura. (C. Aitken)
• Implement database schema version control and Hasura metadata version control. (C. Aitken)
• Separate PDF-related costs from core Equalify costs in the AWS account and establish budget guidance with university leadership. (C. Aitken)
• Establish a regular monthly reporting workflow with Hub automation and align with a consistent release schedule. (C. Aitken)

Documentation and Planning

• Review the documentation and communications plan established with Helen and B. Bertuccelli-Booth. (C. Aitken)
• Prepare an Equalify Tech Spec sheet. (C. Aitken)

Newly Identified Work

• Explore user-audit groups and more fine-grained control over what each user sees on the audit listing page. (T. Daniel)
• Evaluate roll-up reporting capabilities, allowing summary views across multiple audits at once. (T. Daniel)
• Investigate support for custom accessibility rules. (T. Daniel)
• Explore the ability to exclude CMS headers and footers from scan results. (T. Daniel)
• Explore optional LLM-assisted generation of issue descriptions and remediation steps for individual blockers.
• Evaluate the equalify-uic-utilities repository for relevance and next steps.
• Release the monthly report around April 6.

Development Activity

Contributor Activity

Active Repositories

Recent Commit Highlights

• Updated RACI documentation extensively, including revised meeting cadences, new standard operating procedures for student onboarding, support desk and knowledge base operations, service requests, and user testing, along with updated personnel assignments and project task management.
• Added comprehensive technical documentation for Reflow Milestone 4, including fact-checked corrections and content fixes across the Reflow documentation.
• Implemented product-specific signup flows in the Equalify Hub, including a dedicated Reflow landing page with updated copy and a unified multi-product signup experience.
• Added a Reflow documentation section to the Equalify Hub, sourcing content from GitHub-hosted markdown pages.
• Built internal report generation functionality in the Hub, collecting issues and commits from GitHub and compiling key performance indicators for monthly reporting.
• Synchronized waitlist signups directly with Campaign Monitor for streamlined communications management.
• Migrated the Equalify Hub from Yarn to pnpm, upgraded dependencies, and resolved footer logo and development route issues.
• Corrected documentation inaccuracies, including updating alt text generation descriptions to reflect actual system behavior.

Planned Sprints

Infrastructure Sprint (1-2 weeks)

This sprint focuses on making Equalify deployable by any institution. The team will select an infrastructure-as-code framework, create build and deployment scripts for provisioning all required components (Lambda functions, databases, and their relationships), determine a deployment strategy for pushing code updates to provisioned infrastructure, and produce technical documentation covering provisioning, deployment, and a developer-oriented introduction to the platform.

Design and Maintenance Sprint (1-2 weeks)

This sprint will establish a cohesive visual direction for the platform, including alignment on an overall palette, branding guidelines, a component design system for interface consistency, dark mode support, mobile-responsive layouts, and a general code and style cleanup including componentization and minimization of global styles.

Onboarding Features Sprint (1-2 weeks)

This sprint will deliver site onboarding capabilities, including a Lambda-based crawling service for new sites, integration of onboarding features into the audit builder, support for external linked CSVs as a URL source for audits (enabling WordPress plugin integration), and a CSV-based user import feature.