Reporting Up, Your Maturity Roadmap, and the Budget Ask

A metric without a price is just information. A metric with a price is a budget request.

This is the last piece in this series, so let me close it out with the part that actually determines whether everything in the pieces before this one survives past year one: getting somebody with budget authority to understand what they're looking at, and what it costs to make it better.

What to report, and what never to report

Five or six numbers, once a year, each one paired with a price. That's it. That's the whole reporting program.

Top-task conformance — tested with an actual keyboard and screen reader against real WCAG 2.1 AA (opens in new window) criteria on the handful of things residents most often need to do, not a scanner count. Backlog size and age, out of your triage queue. Training completion, by role. The share of your active contracts that carry accessibility clauses. Complaint volume and how long resolution actually takes.

Here's the discipline that makes this useful instead of decorative: never report a single composite "accessibility score." I know it's tempting — one number is easy to put on a slide. But a composite score hides exactly the information leadership needs to see, which is where the specific gaps are and what closing each one would cost. Six honest numbers beat one reassuring one, every time.

And pair every number with a price. "Backlog: 340 items" is information. "Backlog: 340 items, and clearing the top quarter costs about sixty hours" is a decision someone can actually make. The difference between those two sentences is the difference between a report and a budget request.

Score yourself honestly, on a ladder that doesn't flatter you

Eight dimensions — policy and resourcing, inventory and testing, procurement, publishing workflow, training, feedback and complaints, exceptions and records, measurement — each on the same four-rung ladder.

Ad Hoc. Things happen when someone complains. No named owner, no record. Most programs start here. None of them should still be reporting from here two years in.

Planned. A policy exists, an owner is named, an inventory got started — but there's no hours or money actually attached to any of it. This is the rung where good intentions go to die politely, because "planned" costs nothing to claim and nothing ever actually moves.

Resourced. Hours are in writing. A budget line exists. The gates from earlier pieces in this series — pre-publication checks, vendor review — are actually running, not just designed.

Measured. The numbers from the top of this piece, reported on a cycle, tracked year over year, each one still carrying its price tag.

Here's the honest part: "Planned" is the rung that kills small programs, and it's the one that feels the most like progress while you're stuck on it. A policy nobody's funded to execute stays Planned forever. That's exactly why the ask below leads with hours, not a big number.

Three levels, presented together

Present all three at once. A single number invites a no. A menu invites an actual choice, and choices get yeses that flat asks don't.

Level zero — hours only. No new money. A fraction of one person's time, committed in writing. This buys the free things: the statement, the log, the clauses, the publication gate, the inventory, the renewal calendar, honest reporting. It removes most of your avoidable legal exposure and costs exactly the sentence in which leadership agrees to protect your hours. Say plainly what it doesn't buy, too — backlog movement, tooling, testing depth. Don't oversell level zero. It's a floor, not a program.

Level one — a modest line. Hours plus a small annual budget. This is where you add paid structured testing with disabled residents, twice a year. Role-based training time for the people who actually need it. Remediation for the top of your triage queue. One real manual test cycle of your top tasks. For most entities your size, this is the honest target for year one — the level where the program stops being purely defensive and starts producing the numbers from the top of this piece.

Level two — funded. A real line item and named roles, even if fractional. Professional audit support on a cycle. Systematic backlog work with actual dates. Tooling that enforces the gates instead of depending on goodwill. Ask for this level with a year of honest numbers already in hand, not before — a funded request built on real data is the easiest conversation in this entire series. A funded request built on a hope is the hardest.

Whatever gets decided, get it in writing — including if the answer is no. A declined request, documented, is still part of your record. It answers the one question that actually matters later: did the coordinator ask? Silence doesn't answer that question. A dated no does.

One complaint, the whole machine

Everything in this series is abstraction until it isn't. Here's a realistic one, run through every piece of what you've just read.

A resident emails on a Tuesday afternoon: she uses a screen reader, and tonight's council agenda packet is "just pictures." It's a two-hundred-page scan, posted that morning. You log it — ninety seconds, date, channel, person, item. You acknowledge the same day, because the meeting is tonight and this is a same-day situation. Someone emails her the agenda as text and the staff reports as their original files, offers a phone walk-through for anything left. She has what she needs by five-thirty. The PDF itself is still broken, and that's fine — her access and the underlying defect are two separate tracks, and you just ran both of them correctly.

The next day, you reproduce it and classify: systemic, not isolated, because every packet made this way has the same defect. The real fix is upstream — the software already exports proper tagged files; the scan happens because two departments still submit paper. The fix is a workflow instruction, not a remediation project. The complaint sends "current meeting packets" straight to the top of the triage queue. Friday, you close the loop: an email telling her what changed, a resolution date in the log, one more data point for the quarterly pattern review.

Total cost: maybe three staff hours. The alternative — the version where nobody answers her — is how you end up explaining yourself to someone with a lot more leverage than you, with the worst fact any file can hold: you knew, and there's no record you did anything about it. It's exactly the pattern DOJ's own published settlements (opens in new window) follow, over and over: audit, corrective plan, named owner, record.

The part I actually want you to remember

I said in the first piece of this series that none of this is really about compliance, and you'll figure that out for yourself somewhere around month four if you haven't already. Somewhere in your jurisdiction is a person who can't pay a bill online, can't read the agenda before their neighborhood gets rezoned, can't fill out the form that decides whether they get the thing they need. They're not filing complaints. They're not on anybody's dashboard. They just stopped trying, and the system quietly recorded that as no demand.

You're the only person in the building whose job is to notice that. Every chapter of this series — the law, the ninety days, the triage, the procurement, the VPATs, the record, the reporting — exists to serve that one fact. Any part of the job that doesn't serve it is decoration.

That's the whole series. Go build the boring parts. They're the ones that actually hold.

None of this series is legal advice — it's a field map, built to be checked against your own counsel and your own facts, not relied on in place of either. If you want a fast first read on where a specific page or document actually stands before you bring it to anyone, ask Luke. Our accessibility statement and methodology show this same discipline applied to our own site, and WCAG success criteria is worth bookmarking for the day a report doesn't explain itself.

Previous: building the record · Start over: you're the ADA coordinator, the law behind the job

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Sources: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 (opens in new window) · DOJ Disability Rights Cases and Settlements (opens in new window) · DOJ guidance on web accessibility and the ADA (opens in new window) · DOJ Disability Rights Section (opens in new window)