Adjusting Analytics for Accessibility to Work with Consent Frameworks

Consent frameworks help your site or app obtain, manage, and refer to a user's consent for certain behaviors, such as using analytics.

From a user's perspective, this commonly takes the form of "cookie" notices and dialogs.

For Analytics for Accessibility to integrate correctly into a consent framework, 1 specific part needs to be adjusted.

Delaying "Accessibility Page Load" Events Until Consent Has Been Obtained

By default, the main doc for Analytics for Accessibility recommends capturing "accessibility page load" events as soon as they resolve.

However, if the user hasn't consented to the use of analytics yet this information may be discarded and lost by the analytics provider.

Instead, the events need to be queued up until after consent has been obtained.

Here is some pseudocode of what the adjustments to the Analytics for Accessibility configuration would need to look like

    globalThis.a11y_analytics_config = {
      providers: {
        ga: {
          callbacks: {
            onSyncItemsResolved() {
              // gtag('event', 'syncItems page-name'); // Old code

              if (checkIfUserHasAlreadyGivenConsent() === true) {
                gtag('event', 'syncItems page-name');

                return;
              }

              storeKeyValueInConsentInMemoryStorage("a11y_analytics_onSyncItemsResolved", true)
            },
            onUsesKeyboardResolved() {
              // gtag('event', 'usesKeyboard page-name'); // Old code 

              if (checkIfUserHasAlreadyGivenConsent() === true) {
                gtag('event', 'usesKeyboard page-name');

                return;
              }

              storeKeyValueInConsentInMemoryStorage("a11y_analytics_onUsesKeyboardResolved", true)
            },
            onUsesPinchZoomResolved() {
              // gtag('event', 'usesPinchZoom page-name'); // Old code 

              if (checkIfUserHasAlreadyGivenConsent() === true) {
                gtag('event', 'usesPinchZoom page-name');

                return;
              }

              storeKeyValueInConsentInMemoryStorage("a11y_analytics_onUsesPinchZoomResolved", true)
            },
          }
        }
      }
    }
    

And here is some pseudocode of what the adjustments to the consent framework would need to look like

    function onUserHasGivenConsent() {
      // Lots of other code

      if (getValueFromConsentInMemoryStorage("a11y_analytics_onSyncItemsResolved") === true) {
        gtag('event', 'syncItems page-name');
      }

      if (getValueFromConsentInMemoryStorage("a11y_analytics_onUsesKeyboardResolved") === true) {
        gtag('event', 'usesKeyboard page-name');
      }

      if (getValueFromConsentInMemoryStorage("a11y_analytics_onUsesPinchZoomResolved") === true) {
        gtag('event', 'usesPinchZoom page-name');
      }
      
      // Lots of other code
    }
    

Those 2 sets of changes should be all that's needed to ensure all Analytics for Accessibility events are recorded in your analytics provider once a user provides their consent.