Document Inventory and Triage: Your Own Documents Are the Tractable Part
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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.
You will not out-engineer your vendors. You can out-document them. Start with what's actually yours.
Most of what patrons use is licensed third-party content you can't remediate locally — ebook platforms, research databases, the discovery layer. That's covered in the next piece. This one is about the smaller, genuinely tractable pile: your own catalogs, program calendars, board minutes, and public materials.
Gate one: should this even be a document?
Retire what's superseded — old program calendars, outdated board minutes nobody references. Replace with an actual web page whatever never needed to be a PDF; most program announcements fall in this category. Recreate from the source file wherever it exists. Even at small-library scale, this gate clears a real share of the total before any remediation work happens, and the decisions are permanent.
Gate two: does the archive exception apply?
The archived-content exception (opens in new window) does real work for local-history scans, digitized newspaper morgues, and oral-history collections — if the material sits in a clearly identified archive area, is retained for reference and research, and is unaltered. Test it item by item, not by folder sweep, and remember its two edges: the exception is lost the moment archived material gets pulled into a program, exhibit, or course page, and the accessible-on-request duty survives regardless — when a specific patron needs specific pages, you provide them accessibly, which at this scale usually means OCR-and-structuring just the requested pages, not the whole collection.
Then rank what's left
Rank survivors by traffic, stakes, and complaint volume divided by effort — same discipline as every sector in this series. A board minutes page or a catalog search barrier that blocks someone from finding what your library actually offers outranks a program flyer from an event that already happened. A named complaint overrides the ranking every time, and given how often a library's real complaint channel is a patron mentioning it at the desk, make sure whoever staffs your desk knows to pass that along, not just handle it informally and let it go unlogged.
This isn't legal advice on how the archive exception applies to your specific collection — verify against your own counsel. If you want a fast first read on where a document stands before you triage it, ask Luke to take a look. See our methodology for how we verify claims like these.
Previous: your first 90 days · Next: procurement leverage for licensed platforms
Sources: 28 CFR 35.201 — Exceptions (opens in new window) · 28 CFR Part 35, Subpart H — Web and Mobile Accessibility (opens in new window) · Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 (opens in new window) · U.S. Access Board — Revised 508 Standards (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.