Planning Your Accessibility Work

A practical guide for chairs, program directors, and anyone who stewards a body of digital content: how to find out what you have, decide what matters first, and plan the work.

Why This Matters Now

Departments rarely fall behind on this because they do not care. They fall behind because no one has ever counted what the department has published — the syllabi, the handbooks, the committee minutes, the program review self-studies, the decade of seminar recordings. The five steps below turn a broad obligation into work you can schedule across an academic year.

Step 1 — Take Stock of What Your Unit Has Published

You cannot plan for content you have never counted. A simple spreadsheet is enough. One row per item, or per group of similar items.

The "still current?" column will do more work than any other. Most departments discover that a substantial part of what they host is a course that no longer runs, a policy since superseded, or a form replaced two systems ago. Retiring that content is legitimate, and it is far quicker than remediating it.

A shortcut for websites: if your unit's site is scanned by Siteimprove, much of this inventory already exists. Use your site's report rather than compiling the list by hand.

Step 2 — Decide What Comes First

Not everything can be first. Weigh each item against three questions and let the answers set your order.

A rarely-visited PDF that is the only route to a required petition form outranks a much-visited page whose content also appears in the catalog. Volume of readers is not the test on its own — dependency is.

Step 3 — Understand What the Work Involves

Effort varies enormously by format. Knowing which categories your inventory falls into tells you whether you are looking at a task for one afternoon or a project for the year.

Step 4 — Understand Where the Time Goes

The single largest factor in how long this work takes is not how much content your unit has. It is when accessibility enters the process. The same syllabus can represent a few minutes of attention or several hours of painstaking repair, depending entirely on the point at which someone thought about it.

Three kinds of work, from quickest to slowest:

1. Creating new content accessibly — the fastest by far

Applying a heading style rather than enlarging and bolding a line of text costs nothing extra. Writing a sentence of alt text as you place a figure takes about as long as writing the caption. Marking a table's header row is a single command. Done at the point of authoring, accessibility is not a separate task with its own timeline; it is a handful of habits inside work already underway.

This is why everything your unit produces from this point forward should be accessible as it is written. It is the only category of this work that does not accumulate.

2. Converting existing content — moderate, and often assisted

When you have a document already and the new version is permitted to look different from the original, conversion is usually the sensible route. A scanned reading becomes a tagged, readable text document. A print handout becomes a clean web page. Tools can do much of the labour — the SensusAccess conversion service handles a good deal of this automatically, and converted output still needs a human to check it, but the bulk of the effort is not manual.

The saving comes from the freedom to change the presentation. You are producing an accessible equivalent, not reproducing the original artefact.

3. Remediating in place — the hardest work there is

The most demanding case is repairing an existing inaccessible document while keeping its look, feel, format, and style precisely as they are. That constraint is what makes it expensive. Every correction has to be made inside a layout you are not allowed to alter: tags added by hand, reading order reconstructed element by element, table structure rebuilt cell by cell, and scanned pages put through OCR and then corrected before any of that can even begin. The work is meticulous, it resists automation, and the effort is difficult to predict until someone opens the file.

Reserve this approach for documents where the exact published form genuinely matters — a signed policy, an accreditation submission, an archived document of record, anything with legal or historical standing. For the rest, converting (2) will serve your readers just as well for a fraction of the effort.

For help estimating what your own inventory will take, request a consultation. We would rather size the work with you than have you guess at it.

Step 5 — Keep the Backlog from Rebuilding

Remediation is finite work. Preventing new inaccessible content is what stops the count climbing back to where it started.

• Fold the relevant content checklist into how your unit already reviews its work, rather than adding a separate step.
• Name one colleague as the department's point of contact for accessibility questions.
• Ask for accessibility documentation before adopting a platform, not after it is in a course.
• Keep source files. Publishing a PDF and discarding the Word document behind it guarantees the expensive kind of work later.
• Retire superseded content on a regular cycle — after program review is a natural moment — so the inventory stops growing.

Where to Get Help

Next step: take stock using the Step 1 table, then book a consultation so we can look at it with you.