How to Prioritize When You Have Thousands of Inaccessible Documents
Prioritize by student impact, urgency, scope and measured effort. Keep difficult high-impact material assigned rather than assuming an 80/20 rule settles the backlog.
A large accessibility backlog needs an inventory and a defensible order of work. Prioritization should follow actual student tasks and applicable obligations rather than a universal 80/20 estimate.
Assess scope and urgency
Record active use, content owner, source availability, format, known barriers and time sensitivity. Student requests and consequential tasks can require urgent attention. Assess legal scope and exceptions before treating every historic document as identical work or assuming an unused-content label creates an exemption.
Compare impact and effort
High-impact straightforward corrections can be addressed early. High-impact complex material needs specialist capacity and appropriate interim access; difficulty is not a reason to leave it unowned. Lower-impact work can be scheduled, grouped or replaced when the resulting route still meets the institution's needs.
Retiring genuinely unused material can reduce inventory. Do not delete required teaching content simply to improve a score or conceal a barrier.
Measure capacity
Trial representative sources and record preparation, corrections, review and manual fallback. Batch job completion is not accepted remediation. Estimates should change when the inventory, complexity or measured review effort changes.
Aelira Core is beta software. Supported workflows can apply eligible partial fixes and record outcomes, but some inputs need manual work or cannot produce a downloadable remediated file. Review the actual saved output, unresolved findings and content preservation before publication. Automated scores describe implemented checks rather than accessibility conformance. Inspect the public source and release documentation and evaluate a representative authorized sample before planning a rollout.
Track outcomes
Track time to usable material, reviewed outputs, unresolved barriers and ownership. Scanner scores describe implemented checks, rather than a department's overall legal compliance. A systematic plan and progress support management but do not guarantee that all obligations have been met.
Coordinate student access with disability services while the remaining work is addressed.
RD (Reg) Crampton
•Founder & CEOFounder, CEO & lead developer of Aelira. Building beta tools to help faculty and accessibility teams check materials and evaluate suggested fixes, with human review required.
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