Your First 90 Days as an ADA Coordinator

Nobody is going to train you. Here is the part they leave out.

Somebody handed you this job.

Maybe it came with a title change and no raise. Maybe it got stapled onto communications, or IT, or HR, or whatever department had a warm body and a manager who didn't fight back fast enough in the meeting. Maybe you asked for it, in which case, congratulations, you are the rarest bird in local government and also probably about to have a bad year.

However you got here, you now own a federal civil rights obligation for an organization that has not budgeted for it, does not report to you, and will find out you exist the first time you tell them no.

Nobody is going to train you. There is no onboarding packet. There is a binder somewhere from 2011 and the person who made it retired.

So here it is. The part they leave out.

Weeks 1–3: Find out how bad it is, and tell no one

I spent a lot of years in kitchens before I did this work, and the first thing you learn walking into a new kitchen is that the menu is a lie. The menu is what the owner wishes were true. What is actually true is in the walk-in.

So you go in the walk-in. You look at the dates. You smell the fish. You find out what you actually have before you promise anybody anything, because the moment you say "yes chef" to a thing you cannot deliver, you own it.

Same job here. Your first three weeks are the walk-in.

Do not announce a program. Do not send an all-staff email about your exciting new role. Do not stand up in a department head meeting and explain WCAG, because I promise you the only outcome of that meeting is that eleven people now know your name in the specific way you do not want to be known.

Instead, quietly find out:

How many public-facing digital properties you actually have. Not how many the website team thinks you have. The real number. There is always a microsite. There is always a portal somebody's cousin built in 2014 that the water department depends on. There is always a mobile app nobody remembers procuring.

Who buys software here. This is the most important thing you will learn in your first month and nobody will tell you where to look. Find out who signs contracts, what threshold triggers competitive bidding, and whether accessibility language is in your standard terms. If it isn't, every dollar spent between now and the day you fix that buys another inaccessible thing you will personally be responsible for later.

What's already been complained about. Go find the complaints. There are complaints. They went to somebody's inbox and died there. Those are not embarrassments to be buried — they are the only free market research you will ever get, and they are the closest thing you have to a priority list written by the people who actually need this to work.

Who your users are. Not personas. People. There is a disability advocacy organization in your county and they have been trying to get somebody's attention for years. Buy them coffee. Shut up and listen for an hour. You will learn more than any audit will tell you, and you will have made the one ally who can vouch for you later when somebody accuses you of inventing problems.

Write all of it down. Show it to nobody yet.

Weeks 4–8: Learn the difference between a fix and a story about a fix

Here is where it gets ugly, so let me be direct.

There is an entire industry built around selling you a feeling.

You will get the emails. You will get the LinkedIn messages. Somebody will offer you a widget — one line of JavaScript, drop it in the header, and your site becomes compliant. There will be a badge you can put in your footer. There will be a certificate with your organization's name on it, suitable for framing, suitable for handing to a city attorney who wants to stop thinking about this.

It is a lie and it is an expensive one.

The people who actually use screen readers have been saying this loudly for years. Those tools frequently make sites harder to use, not easier — they fight the assistive technology the user already configured, they override settings people spent years dialing in, and they announce themselves as a solution to a problem they are actively making worse. Meanwhile the underlying site is exactly as broken as it was, and now it has a badge on it.

I have a lot of contempt for that business. I want to be clear about where it's aimed. Not at you — you're the line cook here, you got handed a station and no prep and you're doing what you can. It's aimed at the people who look at a legal deadline and a stressed public servant with no budget and see a sales opportunity.

The tell is simple. Ask any vendor this question:

"What exactly are you certifying, and what happens to that certification when someone files a complaint?"

Watch what happens. A serious vendor will tell you they can't certify conformance, because nobody honestly can — accessibility is not a state you achieve, it's a practice you maintain, and any file can regress the day after you check it. What a serious vendor can give you is evidence: what was tested, when, by whom, what was found, what was decided, what got fixed, and what didn't and why.

That distinction is the whole job. A badge is a story about a fix. A record is a fix.

And when the complaint comes — I'm going to say when, because the deadlines are real (opens in new window) and the plaintiffs' bar can read a calendar — the badge is worth nothing. The record is worth everything. The question in that room is never "were you perfect." Nobody is perfect. The question is "did you know, and what did you do about it." Only one of those two things answers it.

Weeks 9–12: Mise en place, or you will drown

Every functional kitchen runs on prep. Not talent. Prep.

The good line cook isn't the fast one. The good line cook is the one whose station is set up so that the busy period is boring. Everything within reach, everything labeled, everything done ahead of time so that when forty tickets hit at once you're executing, not improvising.

Bad kitchens improvise. Bad kitchens are exciting. You do not want an exciting compliance program.

So in your last month, before you go public with anything, build the boring infrastructure:

A remediation queue with an actual order to it. Highest traffic, highest stakes, highest complaint volume first. Not alphabetical. Not whatever the loudest department wants. If somebody can't pay a water bill or apply for a permit or find out when the council meets, that's the front of the line.

Accessibility language in procurement. This is the single highest-leverage thing you will do all year and it is free. Every contract from here forward carries a conformance requirement and a remedy if the vendor doesn't meet it. You cannot remediate your way out of a purchasing problem, and every month you wait, somebody buys another thing you'll have to fix.

A record that outlives you. Dated, structured, boring. What was tested, what was found, what got fixed, what's queued, what's been accepted as a known issue and why. If you get hit by a bus, your successor should be able to pick it up and know exactly where things stand. That document is also, not incidentally, your defense.

One executive who understands the exposure. Not a committee. Committees are where accountability goes to die. One person with budget authority who understands that this is a legal obligation with a date attached, not an IT nice-to-have.

What nobody says out loud

You are going to be the least popular person in several rooms.

You will tell a department their brand-new sixty-thousand-dollar system doesn't work for a blind employee. You will tell communications the PDF they've already sent to the printer has to be rebuilt. You will tell somebody's favorite vendor no. And you'll do it without authority, without budget, and often without your own manager fully understanding why you're being difficult.

The line cook who says the fish is off is not thanked. The line cook who says nothing and sends it out is not thanked either — right up until somebody gets sick, and then everybody remembers exactly who was working that station.

Say the fish is off. Every time. Write it down when you say it.

The part that keeps you here

None of this is really about compliance and you'll figure that out around month four.

Somewhere in your jurisdiction there is a person who cannot pay a bill online. Who cannot read the agenda before the meeting where their neighborhood gets rezoned. Who cannot fill out the form that decides whether they get the thing they need. They are not filing complaints. They are not on your dashboard. They just stopped trying, and the system recorded that as no demand.

You are the only person in the building whose job is to notice.

That's it. That's the whole thing. Everything above — the audits, the queue, the procurement language, the boring dated record — exists to serve that, and any part of your program that doesn't serve that is decoration.

Ninety days from now you'll know where your walk-in is, what's rotten in it, and who to call. That's not a program yet. That's prep.

Prep is the job.

This isn't legal advice — it's what worked for me, in one seat, and your facts and your counsel are what actually govern your situation. If you want a first read on a specific page before you decide where it lands on your list, ask Luke to take a look. And if you haven't yet, it's worth knowing what your actual obligation looks like against WCAG 2.1 AA (opens in new window) before anyone hands you a badge and calls it done.

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Previous: the law behind the job · Next: document inventory and triage

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Sources: DOJ guidance on web accessibility and the ADA (opens in new window) · Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 (opens in new window) · 28 CFR Part 35, Subpart H — Web and Mobile Accessibility (opens in new window)