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 — even when the audience is a volunteer library board.
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 board or city council to understand what they're looking at, and what it costs to improve.
Five or six numbers, each with a price
Top-task conformance on your own catalog and site — tested with an actual keyboard and screen reader against WCAG 2.1 AA (opens in new window), not a scanner count. The number of licensed platforms with a current, requested Accessibility Conformance Report on file, versus the total you carry. Complaint volume and how fast they're resolved. Whether accessibility language made it into your most recent renewals.
Never report a single composite "accessibility score" — it hides exactly what a board needs to see. Pair every number with a price, even a small one: "twelve of our eighteen licensed platforms have no ACR on file" is information; "twelve of eighteen — requesting the rest through our consortium costs a few hours of follow-up" is a decision someone can act on.
Score yourself honestly, on a ladder sized for one person
Four rungs: Ad Hoc (things happen when a patron mentions something, nothing gets written down), Planned (a statement exists, but nobody's set aside real hours for it — the rung where good intentions quietly stall), Resourced (hours protected in writing, even a few a week, the intake habit actually running), Measured (the numbers above, tracked and reported on some regular cycle, even annually).
"Planned" is where most one-person programs get stuck, because there's no formal budget process forcing the hours question to ever get asked out loud. That's exactly why the ask below starts with hours, not dollars.
Three levels, presented together, sized for a small budget
Level zero — hours only. A few protected hours a week, in writing. Buys the statement, the intake log, the renewal-time ACR requests, honest reporting. Removes most avoidable exposure. Doesn't buy remediation of licensed platforms — say so plainly, since that's genuinely outside a single library's control anyway.
Level one — a modest line. Hours plus a small annual amount: a paid conversation with a local disability organization, staff time for basic training, and participation in whatever consortium accessibility push already exists. For most small libraries, this is the honest target once level zero is running.
Level two — funded. Rare at this scale, but worth naming: a real line item for periodic professional testing support, or a formal role for accessibility split across staff.
Whatever's decided, get it in writing, including if the answer is no for now. A documented no still answers the question that matters later: did someone ask?
The part worth remembering
Somewhere in your community is a patron who couldn't check out an ebook, couldn't search the catalog, couldn't find the program calendar in a format that worked for them — and never said anything at the desk. They just stopped coming. Every piece in this series exists to serve the fact that you're the person whose job is to notice that, even without a title that says so. Go build the boring parts. They're the ones that actually hold, and at this scale, they're also the ones you can actually finish.
None of this series is legal advice — it's a field map, meant to be checked against your own counsel and your library's specific facts. If you want a fast first read on a page before you bring it to your board, ask Luke. Our accessibility statement and methodology show this same discipline applied to our own site.
Previous: building the record · Start over: nobody else is doing this, the law behind the job
Sources: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 (opens in new window) · DOJ guidance on web accessibility and the ADA (opens in new window) · Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) overview (opens in new window) · 28 CFR Part 35, Subpart H — Web and Mobile Accessibility (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.