Accessibility Governance in Institutional WordPress Environments
This document describes an accessibility governance approach used to manage accessibility remediation in a large institutional WordPress environment containing thousands of media files, many of them PDFs.
The Problem
Most accessibility remediation ultimately happens at the file level. Each document must be evaluated and either remediated, replaced, or removed.
The difficulty is not the audit itself, but the scale and distribution of ownership.
In large institutional websites, thousands of documents are published by many different authors and departments. Without clear ownership and triage, remediation quickly becomes unmanageable.
The practical challenge therefore becomes governance: identifying which documents exist, determining who is responsible for them, and presenting those documents to stakeholders in a way that allows them to decide whether content should be remediated, removed, or replaced.
Constraints
- decentralized content ownership
- limited central accessibility support
- legacy PDFs and documents
- inconsistent document practices
Strategy
Because remediation ultimately happens at the document level, the goal was not to eliminate file-by-file evaluation but to make that process manageable.
The strategy focused on three capabilities:
- building a reliable inventory of documents
- identifying ownership and page context
- presenting documents to stakeholders in a way that supports triage decisions
To support this process, a lightweight internal tool was developed.
Meet Marshmallow
Marshmallow is a lightweight internal tool that inventories documents in a WordPress environment and presents them for accessibility triage and governance.
The tool works by parsing WordPress export files to extract document references and build an inventory of documents within the site.
The interface allows reviewers to examine documents in context and categorize them for remediation, removal, or replacement.
Supporting scripts generate reports identifying newly discovered or orphaned files and track changes between site exports. This allows the system to detect document drift as the site evolves.
Rather than attempting to remediate documents directly, Marshmallow focuses on governance: ensuring that documents are visible, connected to stakeholders, and queued for appropriate action.