How Honeylove Accelerated Digital Accessibility Compliance with an Integrated Solution

• Shapewear brand Honeylove is committed to providing inclusive experiences for all customers—but the brand faced legal complaints regarding the accessibility of its website.
• Honeylove’s development team initially struggled to make progress fixing accessibility issues while balancing remediation with new projects.
• The Level Access Platform’s project management integration enabled Honeylove to streamline accessibility issue remediation, reducing the proportion of developers’ time devoted to accessibility-related administrative work from 50% to 10%.
• The brand also provided role-specific and organization-wide accessibility training through the Level Access Academy to uplevel its teams’ skills.
• As a result, Honeylove successfully cleared its backlog of accessibility issues, fixing 99% of identified issues, and reduced legal risk.
• The brand’s commitment to accessibility extends beyond technical aspects, with improved customer experience and better support for shoppers with disabilities.

Cult-favorite shapewear brand Honeylove welcomes customers of “all shapes, sizes, and backgrounds,” including people with disabilities. So when the brand received legal complaints regarding the accessibility of its website, the team swiftly took action by requesting a comprehensive accessibility evaluation.

That evaluation created a backlog of accessibility issues Honeylove’s development team struggled to make progress remediating. Tackling the backlog was particularly challenging as the team balanced accessibility with work required for new projects. And, as a result, the brand remained a target for lawsuits. “It was frustrating that, even while we were trying to work through our backlog, we were still receiving legal complaints,” says Daniel Upton, Honeylove’s Chief Technology Officer. “We weren’t moving quickly enough.”

To reduce legal risk, and provide a customer experience aligned with its values, Honeylove needed to empower its developers to more efficiently address accessibility issues—whether on its live site or as they built new experiences.

As Honeylove aimed to accelerate issue remediation, the team began leveraging the Level Access Platform’s issue tracking integration with project management platform Asana (the Level Access Platform also integrates with other popular project management tools, including Jira and Azure DevOps). The bi-directional integration automatically synced detailed evaluation findings and task information with developers’ existing workspaces in Asana, so the team saved time not having to navigate multiple systems. They could communicate and collaborate with each other—and Level Access experts—within each Asana task. “The Asana integration streamlined work tremendously,” says Max McDonough, a software engineer at Honeylove. “Instead of wasting precious time constantly moving back and forth between different platforms, I could access all the information I needed, all in one system.”

Altogether, Max estimates that the Asana integration reduced the amount of time he spent on administrative work related to accessibility from 50% to just 10%. He could devote the other 90% of his day to actively working through Honeylove’s backlog, resulting in faster remediation progress.

Equipping developers with more advanced tools for managing remediation wasn’t the only step Honeylove took to empower its teams to tackle accessibility more effectively. The brand also implemented role-specific and organization-wide accessibility training through the Level Access Academy, helping everyone from designers and developers to customer experience professionals expand their accessibility knowledge and build crucial skills.

This investment in education not only further accelerated the rate at which Honeylove was able to address existing issues, but also reduced the number of new issues introduced with updates to the brand’s website—ensuring Honeylove won’t end up confronting another substantial backlog.

Thanks to the Level Access Platform’s streamlined workflow management solutions and practical training through Academy, Honeylove successfully cleared its backlog of accessibility issues. The team fixed 99% of the issues identified in the initial accessibility evaluation, and only three critical issues were detected in a subsequent automated scan. For context, it’s not unusual for scans to surface thousands of critical issues in similar e-commerce websites.

Now that Honeylove is equipped to efficiently resolve accessibility barriers, legal action targeting the brand has subsided—but the benefits of prioritizing accessibility extend well beyond mitigating legal risk. “Our site is much more usable for all our customers, and not just keyboard navigation and screen reader users,” says Upton. “The layout is more intuitive, and the code is higher quality.”

Honeylove’s commitment to inclusive experience isn’t limited to technical accessibility. Having completed the Level Access Academy’s awareness and sensitivity training, the brand’s Customer Experience team can now provide better assistance to shoppers with disabilities—ensuring every customer is fully supported at every stage of their journey. “We show up every day aiming to provide a best-in-class experience to all of our customers,” says Bekkering. “Our partnership with Level Access allows us to ensure that everyone who visits our website has an exceptional experience with Honeylove.”