Reporting Up, Your Maturity Roadmap, and the Budget Ask
Trust note
This article was written by a person and reviewed against accessibility.chat editorial standards. Treat it as research and education rather than legal advice. We prioritize primary sources and correct material errors.
A metric without a price is information. A metric with a price is a budget request.
This is the last piece in this series, so let me close with the part that decides whether everything before it survives past year one: getting your provost, deans, or board to understand what they're looking at, and what it costs to improve.
Five or six numbers, each with a price
Top-task conformance — tested with an actual keyboard and screen reader against WCAG 2.1 AA (opens in new window) on what students actually need to do: enroll, access course materials, submit work. Backlog size and age. The share of active procurement carrying accessibility clauses, across every department, not just central IT. Complaint volume and time to resolution, measured against the semester clock, not a generic SLA. Training completion by role, including faculty specifically.
Never report a single composite "accessibility score" — it hides exactly what a provost or board needs to see. Pair every number with a price: "backlog: 600 items" is information; "backlog: 600 items, clearing the top quarter costs eighty hours" is a decision someone can act on.
Score yourself honestly, on a ladder that doesn't flatter you
Eight dimensions — policy and resourcing, inventory and testing, procurement, publishing workflow, training, feedback and complaints, exceptions and records, measurement — each on a four-rung ladder: Ad Hoc (things happen when someone complains, no owner, no record), Planned (a policy exists, an owner is named, but no hours or money are attached — the rung where good intentions go to die politely), Resourced (hours in writing, gates actually running, the purchasing-system gate actually enforced), Measured (the numbers above, tracked year over year with prices attached).
"Planned" is the rung that kills programs in this sector specifically, because the RACI ambiguity between disability services and IT lets a policy exist on paper indefinitely without either office funding its execution.
Three funding levels, presented together
Level zero — hours only. A fraction of one person's time, in writing. Buys the statement, the log, procurement clauses embedded in the purchasing system, honest reporting. Removes most avoidable exposure. Doesn't buy backlog movement, accessible-by-default template rollout, or testing depth — say so plainly.
Level one — a modest line. Hours plus a small annual budget: paid structured testing with disabled students twice a year, faculty-facing remediation help, one manual test cycle of top student tasks. For most institutions this size, the honest target for year one.
Level two — funded. A real line item and named fractional roles across both disability services and IT: professional audit support on a cycle, systematic backlog work, tooling that enforces the gates instead of depending on goodwill. Ask for this level with a year of honest numbers in hand.
Whatever's decided, get it in writing, including a decline. A documented no still answers the question that matters later: did the office ask?
The part worth remembering
Somewhere in your student body is someone who couldn't access a reading, couldn't submit an assignment on equal footing, couldn't participate in a discussion board the way their classmates could — and never filed a complaint. They just fell behind, or dropped the course, and the institution recorded that as something other than what it was. Every chapter in this series exists to serve the fact that you're one of the people whose job is to notice that. Go build the boring parts. They're the ones that actually hold.
None of this series is legal advice — it's a field map, meant to be checked against your own counsel and your institution's specific facts. If you want a fast first read on a page before you bring it to your provost's office, ask Luke. Our accessibility statement and methodology show this same discipline applied to our own site.
Previous: building the record · Start over: you own digital accessibility, the law behind the job
Sources: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 (opens in new window) · DOJ-ED Joint Dear Colleague Letter on Online Accessibility (opens in new window) · UC Berkeley Consent Decree — DOJ Press Release (opens in new window) · 34 CFR Part 104 — Section 504 Regulations (opens in new window)
About Jeff Fryer
Jeff Fryer spent years working kitchens before moving into ADA compliance work for local government. He writes from that experience -- direct, plainspoken, allergic to compliance theater. Contributing writer at accessibility.chat.
Jeff Fryer is a person, not one of the AI analyst lenses this site also publishes under. A named human is accountable for this article.
Specialization: Local government ADA compliance, contributed from direct field experience
Authorship and Editorial Process
Jeff Fryer wrote this article. AI was not used to draft it. It went through the same editorial checks as everything else published here.