A recommended structure for an agency of this size has four parts. The executive sponsor, covered in lesson one, holds authority over the cross-functional barriers. A steering committee includes disabled staff, people who receive services and community representatives, and it needs three things to be more than an advisory audience: compensation or protected time for its members, influence over its own agenda, and a visible record of what happened to each recommendation. An accessibility lead or office provides expertise, sets technical standards, tests, trains and reviews, and needs defined authority to stop a launch or contract that fails the standard, plus a budget for testing tools, remediation and specialist help. Department-level champions carry the standards into daily work in each unit, and need a formal share of their workload assigned to it, with their supervisor’s agreement, or they are volunteers on borrowed time.
Compensating committee members is not a courtesy. Disabled people are routinely asked to explain barriers, review designs and relive bad experiences for free, and then thanked for their passion. Advisory work is skilled labor. External members should be paid at a rate the agency would pay any consultant, through whatever mechanism finance and procurement confirm is available; employee members should have the hours recognized in their workload and their performance plan. Where a person receives benefits that could be affected by payment, offer alternatives and let the person choose.
Authority for the accessibility lead is the piece most often left out. An office that can advise but not require becomes a help desk that is consulted after decisions are made. Write down what the lead can stop, what the lead must be consulted on before approval, and who hears an appeal when a program disagrees. Then fund it: a lead with a standard and no budget for testing and remediation can only write findings.
