June 2026 Development Report

Reporting period: May 4 – Jun 1, 2026 Sources: #617, #620, #623, #626, #627 Contributors: T. Daniel, C. Aitken

Executive Summary

June was a strong month focused on intelligent features and platform stability, with 32 tasks completed across 132 code commits at a 59% completion rate. The team delivered the initial implementation of LLM-powered blocker summaries to production, providing users with AI-generated remediation guidance for individual accessibility issues. Significant infrastructure hardening addressed scan reliability, query performance, and data accuracy, while the team also completed a stale blocker analysis to guide upcoming performance optimizations.

Highlights

• Launched LLM-powered blocker summaries, delivering AI-generated descriptions and remediation guidance for individual accessibility issues from development through production deployment
• Improved shared audit experience, adding a visual banner to distinguish public read-only audit views and an explanatory modal for the share workflow
• Resolved scan reliability issues, including fixes for stuck scans, query timeouts, and load balancing that improve overall platform stability
• Completed stale blocker analysis, documenting a strategy to address the 20-million-record performance bottleneck in the blockers table
• Deployed crawl and WordPress integration features to the staging environment for validation ahead of production release

Key Metrics

Completed Work

Team

• Deployed the crawl module and WordPress integration features to the staging environment for validation.
• Completed the RED plugin deployment to production.
• Delivered site onboarding features, including the Lambda-based crawling service, integration into the audit builder, and external linked CSV support for WordPress plugin URL synchronization.
• Published the April 2026 development report.

T. Daniel

• Implemented the admin-settable co-brand logo feature for institutional partner branding.
• Added a scanning state indicator to the Audits screen so users can see when scans are in progress.
• Corrected incorrect URL count displays in audit views.
• Aligned language between the WordPress plugin and the Build Audit screen to ensure consistency and emphasize synchronization functionality.
• Investigated anomalous PDF scan metrics where the scanStarted metric was reporting unusually high numbers and PDF-heavy audits showed elevated blocker counts.
• Evaluated the addition of UX performance metrics to monitor frontend responsiveness.
• Resolved the blocker detail page performance issue where navigation to an individual blocker showed a "not found" state before loading.
• Improved blocker filter categories for more intuitive navigation.
• Fixed a bug with blocker table content type filtering.
• Delivered LLM-powered blocker summaries end-to-end: created the database table, configured permissions, set up AWS Bedrock access for the production API, developed and tested the feature in staging, and deployed to production.
• Developed initial work on a centralized stats package for platform usage metrics (users, audits, scan activity).
• Investigated slow blocker table fetching and identified performance constraints.

C. Aitken

• Identified underlying issue with blocker scalability, refactored and successfully ran a migration on production to bring blockers query from 60+ seconds to <1 second load time.
• Added total blockers count display to the interface.
• Fixed the CSV export feature to export the complete blocker dataset rather than only the currently visible page.
• Completed database schema version control and Hasura metadata version control implementation.
• Built a Chrome extension prototype for accessibility testing workflows.
• Worked with Amanda to update user-facing documentation.
• Updated documentation with new site onboarding workflows for crawling and WordPress integration.
• Completed the May 2026 development report.

Notable Events

• May 18 (B. Bertuccelli-Booth): Provided strategic feedback recommending that infrastructure planning prioritize cloud-provider agnosticism, noting that many community members do not use AWS and the platform should minimize vendor lock-in.
• May 21 (C. Aitken): Published the Equalify Stale Blocker Analysis, documenting the performance bottleneck caused by retaining all historical blocker data (approximately 20 million records) and proposing an archival strategy.

Risks & Blockers

• Blockers table performance bottleneck: The blockers database table contains approximately 20 million records, causing slow query performance. A stale blocker analysis has been completed and an archival strategy is under development.
• Short ID namespace collision: Short ID generation was producing collisions that could cause scans to appear incomplete. The ID length has been increased from 6 to 8 characters as an interim fix; further investigation continues.
• Hardcoded configuration values: Paths, regions, and service names are currently hardcoded throughout the codebase, which must be refactored to a centralized configuration before the platform can be deployed by other institutions.

In Progress & Upcoming

Development

• Investigate detailed view performance and conduct a scalability audit. (C. Aitken)
• Fix table CSS styling issues. (T. Daniel)
• Implement semantic versioning with standardized commit message formats and surface current version in the user interface. (C. Aitken)
• Add semantic release information to the Hub. (C. Aitken)

Operations

• Refactor all hardcoded paths, regions, and service names to a centralized environment configuration file. (T. Daniel)
• Include crawl and CSV integration features in the CI/CD pipeline. (C. Aitken)

Newly Identified Work

• Add disclosure language to AI-generated blocker summaries indicating the content is LLM-generated, as discussed in the May 27 DASE meeting. (T. Daniel)

Development Activity

Contributor Activity

Active Repositories

Recent Commit Highlights

• Implemented LLM-powered blocker summaries end-to-end, including initial integration with AWS Bedrock, prompt refinement, markdown-to-HTML output parsing, error handling, and migration from direct database access to Hasura for the options table.
• Improved the shared audit experience by adding a visual banner to the public read-only view and replacing the direct clipboard copy with an explanatory modal when sharing an audit.
• Resolved multiple scan reliability issues: implemented exponential backoff retry logic for GraphQL queries, fixed stuck scan clearing based on recurring CloudWatch errors, and improved Hasura load balancing handling.
• Increased the short ID length from 6 to 8 characters to reduce namespace collisions that could cause scans to appear incomplete.
• Fixed a database-side function that was producing incorrect audit summary counts.
• Added basic mobile styling to improve the platform's responsiveness on smaller screens.
• Removed legacy telemetry (Posthog) and cleaned up unused code including hardcoded email values and an unused SMS function, preparing the codebase for open-source readiness.
• Optimized scan polling behavior to stop refetching after scan completion and increased the polling interval to reduce unnecessary network requests.

Planned Sprints

FOSS Sprint / Infrastructure Week (1-2 weeks)

This sprint focuses on making Equalify deployable by any institution on AWS. The team will select an infrastructure-as-code framework (evaluating Terraform, OpenTofu, and alternatives), create build and deployment scripts for provisioning all required components, determine a deployment strategy for pushing code updates to provisioned infrastructure, and produce both technical documentation for deployment and a developer-focused 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. The sprint will also include planning discussions for roll-up reporting across multiple audits and more fine-grained user-to-audit group permissions.