Managing Expectations for Accessibility Remediation

Universities generate massive amounts of digital content—websites, PDFs, course materials, reports, multimedia, and more. Ensuring that all of this content meets modern accessibility standards is not a one‑time initiative but an ongoing, resource‑intensive commitment. At Georgia Tech, the challenge is not only technical remediation itself, but also aligning the expectations of faculty, staff, and administrators around what it truly takes to make digital content accessible at scale.

This session explores how campus teams can build shared understanding and realistic timelines for addressing accessibility issues across thousands of pages and documents. The presentation will highlight the complexity of remediating legacy websites and PDFs, the continuous creation of new content, and the importance of establishing clear priorities when the volume of work far exceeds the available personnel and time.

Attendees will learn strategies for:

•     Communicating the scope and difficulty of accessibility remediation to non‑technical stakeholders.
•     Prioritizing the most impactful or highest‑risk content when everything cannot be fixed at once.
•     Encouraging distributed responsibility across units rather than centralizing all work in small digital teams.
•     Setting achievable expectations for ongoing compliance in an environment where new content is produced daily.
•     Framing accessibility as a sustained institutional practice, not a one‑off project.

The session will provide practical approaches for building a culture of shared accountability, negotiating timelines, and helping leadership understand both the scale of the challenge and the long‑term commitments required. Participants will come away with communication tools and expectation‑management techniques that support steady, sustainable progress toward a more accessible digital ecosystem.