Models of Adoption
Table of contents
Accessibility buy-in and accountability are part of every role. Some roles take on more of the hands-on work. Others take on policy advocacy and enforcement as well as financial budgeting for accessibility resources.
The flow of accountability from role to role during the progression of a project is illustrated in the examples below. They show different work phases and project types and some possible staffing configurations for larger teams, smaller teams, and institutions within a system or consortium where resources may be shared.
Along with other tools from Agile or Scrum project-management methods, a responsibility matrix, such as a RACI chart, can help you conceptualize accessibility roles. RACI is an acronym that stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. This tool can help structure organizational responsibilities, operational work, and projects by encouraging the inclusion of accessibility experts in project teams, ensuring that responsibility is sensibly distributed, and achieving buy-in at all levels of an organization.
Setting Policy
Setting policy and planning into place is a key step in embedding accessibility planning in the core operational planning. Leadership, management, implementation, and accessibility roles should be included in the policy creation and decision-making involved in this work. Policy setting and planning can include any of the following.
- setting institution-wide goals
- communication and advocacy for these goals
- creation of staffing structures to support these goals
- creation of budgets and funding to carry out these activities
For a detailed RACI matrix for setting policy, see Appendix 1.
Web-based Projects
A large number of projects that digital library staff undertake involves the design, creation, development, and maintenance of websites or system user interfaces (UI’s). Web-based projects require different types of accessibility work depending on the phase of the project.
Phases are often overlapping and non-linear. Examples include:
- planning
- design, Content Creation, and Development
- metadata Specification
- testing
For a detailed RACI matrix for a possible distribution of responsibilities during a development or redesign of a website, go to Appendix 1.
Ongoing Maintenance
Once the initial design, development, testing, and implementation phase are complete, the project team may move on to create or add content, functionality, or metadata fields. When these additions are made to the original website, they should be tracked by the project manager, with time allotted for accessibility-design best practices and accessibility testing. Any fixes are the responsibility of the appropriate team members.
For a detailed RACI matrix example of ongoing maintenance work, go to Appendix 1.
Different Institutional Configurations
Different institutional configurations will cause accessibility work to be carried out with different configurations of team resources. Digital libraries in larger institutions, with centralized, trained personnel, can conduct accessibility testing across all departments, including the digital library.
In smaller institutions, the user-experience design, accessibility monitoring, and testing may be done by the project-management librarian with support by the developer. While the roles laid out above may not be available for all libraries, the accessibility best practices should be adhered to as much as possible.
The following matrices include possible distributions of accessibility responsibilities for smaller teams.
For a view of possible RACI matrices for smaller institutions, go to Appendix 2.
Digitization Projects
Digitization projects require accessibility specification, evaluation, and ongoing monitoring. Often the content from these projects is displayed on a website. If the digital objects are not accessible at the point of creation, the barriers of time, cost, and implementation may prevent future remediation.
These projects have a different staff configuration from the website projects. Sometimes the staff involved in the work is located at the digital library. Other times, the staff taking part in the digitization process are outside vendors. These contractors may also evaluate the digital objects for quality assurance.
At the time of the publication of these guidelines, accessibility considerations for digitization projects were a largely unexplored area in the GLAM and digital-library community. Beyond the suggestions provided here, we recommend that these communities discuss and create collective best practices for the accessibility of digitized content.
Planning Stage
The planning for digitization projects should start early. If the project is grant-funded, then accessibility considerations and staffing should be included in the grant application so that accessibility is accounted for. The department head and project manager are often involved in setting up initial planning and allocating budget appropriation, either in a grant or in the operational budget for a department that is responsible for digitization work.
If digitizing is conducted by an outside vendor, price-estimation information will need to be solicited from the vendor to supplement the accessibility needs for a given digital object.
Digitization or Digital Asset Creation Stage
For each digital object type, vendors and digital team members may be involved in setting and implementing accessibility standards.
Projects that entail scanning a paper-based physical document, book, or image into a digital format may have an internal digitization technician performing the work. While digital best practices to optimize scanned images of physical material are necessary, machine readable text surrogates will help create a more accessible digital object. These text-based assets are sometimes created by content authors, metadata specialists or outside vendors.
If video or audio formats are created or incorporated into a repository of digital objects, transcripts and captions can be created by outside vendors.
Quality Assurance Stage
Conduct quality-assurance work once all the digital objects and supplemental assets are created. This work can be achieved by designated staff members, who can also spot-check the content. The quality assurance team can include developers, content authors, metadata specialists, or even public-service reference staff who might recommend use of these objects to library patrons.
Project managers need to be aware of this stage and allow sufficient time in the project plan for the work.
Ongoing Operations
When changes are made to the digitization process or the supplemental-asset-creation process, it is important to include accessibility best practices into these changes. Introduce additional accessibility quality-assurance methods as needed to ensure that new areas, components, or assets meet accessibility standards.
This ongoing operational work includes planning by the project manager, as well as consultation and additional information provided by the technical lead/developer, content author, metadata specialist, and digitization specialist.
For a view of a RACI matrix depicting some of the possible workflow processes in a digitization project, go to Appendix 3.