Accessibility and Quality Assurance at UC San Diego Library
Building a sustainable, service-based approach to web accessibility for the Library's core public website
Treating the Library’s accessibility backlog as an organizational service, rather than an insurmountable technical debt, made change and progress possible. In August 2021, the core public website had a Quality Assurance score of 55 out of 100 and an accessibility score of 73. Both reflected years of accumulated issues. The standard institutional response to that kind of backlog is to hold it at arm’s length: fix reported bugs, keep new content error-free, and treat the existing backlog as too large to take on. We took a different approach.
The first step was building the team and the structure to do systematic work around accessibility and content quality. In August 2021, we hired the first cohort of the Student Design Team (SDT), a paid student employment program modeled on the same apprenticeship values I had developed at UCLA. In November, we formed the Website Committee, bringing together content leads and web editors distributed across the Library, and established a monthly cadence of accessibility and quality checks. The shift was intentional: instead of reacting to problems, we would find them ourselves, on a schedule, and work through them together.
The results came quickly and held. By September 2022, the Quality Assurance score had risen to 98 and the accessibility score to 91. More significant than the initial jump is what happened after: three years later, both scores remain in the high 80s to mid-90s. In July 2024, the core public website achieved full WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliance for the first time, meeting UC Office of the President accessibility policy. Across the remediation effort, the team resolved over 241,000 accessibility issues across 370 of the Library’s most visited pages.
Student Design Team members were central to that work. They conducted accessibility audits, identified patterns across pages, and implemented fixes — developing real fluency with WCAG standards through the doing, not just the learning. Jenn Dandle, the DX team’s Web Manager, became an increasingly active champion of the work as the program matured, and her leadership of the technical and community-building dimensions has been essential to sustaining it. The Website Committee extended the work’s reach beyond the DX team: web editors across the Library developed their own accessibility practices, and staff questions about accessibility increased. The culture shifted.
In 2024, the DX Team received UC San Diego’s Inclusive Excellence Award for Academic Affairs for this work, recognizing both the accessibility outcomes and the apprenticeship model that made them possible.
Achieving WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliance is a meaningful milestone, and reaching it matters. It also marks a beginning more than an ending. Accessibility is an ongoing practice: standards evolve, content changes, and new work always introduces new questions. The compliance milestone gave us a foundation. The service model we sustain is what allows us to keep moving toward a holistic view of accessibility as an ongoing value and practice.
As we celebrate our success on the core public website, we also recognize that progress elsewhere has been uneven. For Digital Collections, we’ve made a deliberate choice: rather than patch accessibility issues on the current platform, we’re directing development resources toward a full platform migration, designed for accessibility from the start. For LibGuides, the challenges are different. Some accessibility gaps are platform-level issues we’re actively working through with the vendor. Others are distributed across hundreds of subject guides maintained by staff across the organization, which requires a different approach than centralized remediation. That work is slower and more relational, and it’s ongoing.
What changed most durably on the core site was the underlying approach. Accessibility is now a regular team practice, built into how the DX team plans, checks, and ships work. That’s a different outcome than a compliance milestone, and the more important one.