#43412
Speaker(s)
- Judith Risch, Principal, Judith Risch Advisory Services LLC
- Gavin Colborne, Managing Director, Little Forest
- Terrill Thompson, Manager, University of Washington
Session Details
- Length of Session: 1-hr
- Format: Lecture
- Expertise Level: All Levels
- Type of session: General Conference
Summary
When starting a digital accessibility plan it is helpful to know what makes up your site. Pages get added, owners leave, subdomains spin up, and old content stays. Two practitioners walk through how this happens, why it matters for accessibility, and how to figure out what you have. We cover discovery methods, what each one finds and misses, and how to turn an inventory into action. Also the risks of not knowing your full digital presence will be discussed.
Abstract
Ask most accessibility coordinators how many web pages their institution is responsible for. The honest answer is usually some version of "I don't really know." This is not a failure of attention. It is the natural result of how higher education websites grow.
Pages get added by departments, faculty, student groups, research centers, and projects with their own funding. Owners leave the institution. Subdomains spin up for events that ended years ago. Microsites get launched and forgotten. Vendor platforms inject content that the central web team never sees. Content management systems get migrated, leaving orphaned pages behind. Backup copies of old sites linger on staging servers. The result is an institution-wide content estate that nobody has a complete picture of.
This matters for accessibility. You cannot remediate what you cannot see. You cannot prioritize what you have not inventoried. You cannot make defensible decisions about scope when the scope is unknown. Conformance claims, VPAT responses, and OCR resolution agreements all assume you know what you are claiming about.
This session takes the problem seriously. Two practitioners with different vantage points walk through how the unknown-inventory problem develops, why it persists, and what to do about it.
We cover the causes in plain language. We then walk through discovery methods: crawls, search-engine indexing, server logs, DNS records, CMS exports, content audits, departmental surveys, and combinations of these. Each finds different things and misses different things. We explain what each is good for and where each falls short.
The second half of the session focuses on what to do with what you find. Inventory is not the goal. The goal is action. We cover how to turn an inventory into a triage list, how to identify ownership, how to retire content nobody needs, how to set up ongoing discovery so you do not lose ground, and how to communicate the scope honestly to leadership.
Keypoints
- Most institutions do not know what is on their websites, and that is the result of how websites grow.
- No single discovery method finds everything; combining methods produces a more complete inventory.
- An inventory is only useful if it leads to triage, ownership decisions, and ongoing maintenance.
Disability Areas
All Areas
Topic Areas
Uncategorized
Speaker Bio(s)
Judith Risch
Judy is one of the nation’s foremost experts on digital accessibility. She is a twenty-year veteran of the Office of Civil Rights, including five years as Project Director of the National Digital Accessibility Task Force, where she oversaw Section 504 and ADA Title II enforcement across educational institutions and contributed to the 2024 DOJ ADA Title II digital accessibility regulation.
Gavin Colborne
Gavin Colborne is Founder and Managing Director of Little Forest, a company that helps universities and global organizations manage their entire web estate. With over 30 years of industry experience, he brings a practical understanding of the challenges of managing large, complex digital environments. In 2026, Little Forest relaunched its platform as AI-first, giving teams a real-time view of their websites, pages, and documents so they can stay accessible, compliant, and in control.
Gavin is passionate about making the web inclusive for everyone. His work focuses on helping organizations improve accessibility over time, aligned with WCAG standards. Little Forest has developed a tried-and-tested, award-winning methodology to help organizations quickly start governing their web estate, based on over a decade of experience working with more than 50 institutions on this single mission.
Terrill Thompson
Terrill Thompson is manager of the IT Accessibility Team (ITAT) at the University of Washington. ITAT works to promote IT accessibility at the UW by building community, developing resources, delivering lectures and workshops, conducting accessibility evaluations, providing consultation and support to a wide variety of constituents, and conducting research. Terrill has over twenty years experience in the IT accessibility field, and has presented internationally at numerous conferences and consulted widely with local and state government, private industry, and K-12 and postsecondary education entities on IT accessibility issues.