Addressing all areas of the updated ADA Final Rule will require a “whole-organization” response. More than likely, every department of your organization creates content or utilizes a digital system to complete their work.

These content creators, given the right tools and training, are the best equipped staff to remediate digital content and, if necessary, to recreate the digital resources that your staff, students, and community use every day. No one staff member can take on this task by themselves and do it with fidelity across the entire organization.

Staff members working to address the digital accessibility of your organization’s materials will come from across the organization.

Your team should be formed with the following in mind:

• Who is responsible for creating content and materials for your website?
• Who is responsible for vetting new digital platforms and tools that your staff use?
• What other digital assets does your organization create or utilize?
• Who will be responsible for remediating existing digital content?
• Who will be responsible for identifying which content is considered “archived” or not?
• Who will supervise and monitor progress over time?

Now that you’ve identified your team, how will they function?

Keep the following in mind:

• How often will the team meet?
• What resources will they need?
• How will the team communicate with the larger staff?
• What tools might the team need to check existing content for compliance?

Your team must have guidance in order to complete their work. For many staff, this may be the first time they hear about digital accessibility. Set them up for success by setting expectations from the start and working collaboratively. Also, make sure their questions are answered and they are empowered to complete the work you’ve assigned them.

The updated Final Rule is very broad in scope. Your team will need to address many different areas as they complete this work.

In particular, the following strategies can be deployed:

• Survey existing content and platforms to determine level of compliance
• Content and platforms that are the least compliant should be prioritized
• Similarly, content and platforms that reach the most people more often should be prioritized
• Adjust your internal systems in content and platform selection/procurement to ensure new materials are compliant
• Update or create organizational policies to address compliance with the final rule

The requirements of the updated ADA Final Rule are wide-reaching and will likely touch every tool and resource your organization uses. While there is a significant amount of lead-time, there is also a large amount of work to do. Your team will need to prioritize areas that affect the most people. In addition, some areas will need more support than others. Getting those quick wins by turning on settings in one system will help, but if you need to migrate to an entirely different tool for something like content or curriculum management, it will be a lengthy endeavor.

It is likely that the vast majority of your staff create digital content that is shared and must be compliant every year. Because of this, your staff will need to receive training on how to create materials in a compliant way. This may also require a change to the platforms that they use to create materials.

Before rolling out any new training or requirements, your team should create messaging around the requirements, including why the work is needed, who benefits, and how they can help.

• Why is the work needed: Highlight the personal connection that staff have to students, the community, and colleagues who need to utilize assistive technologies.
• Who Benefits: Everyone benefits when materials are digitally accessible. At one point or another, every user may need to increase magnification on a page, utilize a screen reader, or enable captions on videos when viewing in a loud environment.
• How They Can Help: Adjust which platforms and tools they use when creating materials, take time to add alternative text to images or enabling closed captioning, and invest time to ensure accessibility when selecting new tools and platforms to use with students, families, colleagues, and the community.

In order to monitor progress, your team should document the areas of need they identify, make a plan for addressing each, and add updates to the work as they occur. There are many systems out there to help with this work, like the Kanban Method. Multiple software platforms have also been created to put a digital spin on the method.

While it is important to ensure compliance before the implementation deadlines set by the DOJ, this work will be ongoing.

Going forward, nearly all of the digital materials that are created and utilized by your organization will need to be digitally accessible. This will require sustained effort and ongoing compliance.

Staff turnover and shifting priorities will try to pull focus away from this work, but the requirements will still be there. Making sure the work your team does is embedded in your systems going forward is essential to the longevity of this work.