Every policy rests on an authority. Most institutions cannot show which one.
The Knowledge Architecture Institute is a Virginia-based consulting practice that works with public bodies and regulated organizations. We map what you hold, trace each document back to the law or regulation that governs it, and show you where the chain has broken. Every finding carries its source and the date we checked it.
- Statute Virginia Public Records Act Va. Code § 42.1-76 et seq.
- Delegation Records management program Va. Code § 42.1-85
- Retention schedule in force today GS-19, Administrative Records Library of Virginia · effective June 11, 2026 (PDF)
- Regulation the schedule cites Densities, microfilming standards 17VAC15-20-70 · last amended May 1, 2001
- Standard the regulation requires ANSI/AIIM MS23-1998 Superseded by MS23-2004, which ANSI now marks Historical (ANSI store) Chain broken
- AuthorityStatutes, regulations, and the citations that bind.
- RelationshipHow one document depends on another.
- VerifiedRetrieved from source and logged with a date.
- BreakA citation that no longer resolves.
Each status carries a shape and a word as well as a color, because color alone is not an accessible way to convey meaning. The same rule governs every chart and table we deliver.
Services
Fixed scope, fixed price, and a written deliverable you keep. We do not need access to your systems. You supply the documents, or point us at what is already public. Fees for every service.
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Knowledge Architecture Assessment
An inventory of what you hold, an authority map showing which instruments bind and on whom, the citation chains that are broken, the content resting on superseded sources, and the places where two of your own documents disagree.
Two to three weeks -
Extended Assessment
The same method across a wider body of documents, for corpora that genuinely exceed three weeks of work. More to inventory, more chains to trace, and more places where two of your own documents disagree.
Four to five weeks -
Accessibility Position Assessment
Which compliance date binds you and on what basis, which reading of the Virginia dates you have adopted and who approved it, an inventory of the digital estate, and a position summary. For libraries, school divisions, higher education and local government.
Shorter and less costly than a Knowledge Architecture Assessment because this chain is already traced and we maintain it. You are buying its application to your institution, not its construction. The accessibility chain.
One to two weeks -
Custom Body of Knowledge
We build your body of knowledge from your statutes, regulations, policies, and handbooks: the domain model, the governed objects, the citation and provenance chains, and the links to adjacent material. You own the result.
Eight to twenty weeks -
Managed Currency
For a Custom Body of Knowledge. Law changes and your documents do not, so we watch the authorities underneath yours and tell you when they move. Monitoring is by volatility tier rather than by opening every source each morning: a change raises a review item, a person dispositions it, and nothing reaches your baseline without that step. You receive a statement every month recording what was checked, what moved, and what was dispositioned, including the months when nothing moved.
Watch is twenty percent of build a year: we monitor and report, you act. Watch and revise is thirty percent: we make the revision and reissue the governed baseline. Restructuring is included. Where an authority is rewritten and the chain underneath has to be re-traced rather than updated, that work is inside the fee. A cheaper arrangement would exclude precisely the changes you need us for.
A base year and four option years, the options yours to exercise, with the percentage locked to the original build value for the whole term. Smaller baselines take the Annual Reissue instead.
Five-year term -
Annual Reissue
For an assessment or a position rather than a full body of knowledge. Every engagement already carries a currency clause: findings name their own revisit triggers, and an affected determination is reissued at no charge if a trigger fires within twelve months. After that window, an Annual Reissue re-checks the authorities, records what has moved, and reissues the position with a current date on it.
Thirty percent of the original engagement, and it stays thirty percent of the original for as long as the sequence is unbroken: reissue in 2029 and you pay against what you paid in 2026, not against the rate that year. The window is one year and sixty days from delivery, extendable in writing before it closes. Miss it and the next engagement is a new assessment at the current rate.
Per year · window 1 yr + 60 days -
Advisory Retainer
Rolling access for an organization building its own knowledge governance capability. Design review, authority modeling, and a standing call.
Per month -
Conformance Readiness Review · institutions
For a public body that has already published an accessibility statement. What it claims, which authority it names, whether that authority sets your obligation, and whether your stated scope reaches the systems your users sign in to. For institutions.
Two weeks -
Conformance Readiness Review · vendors
For software vendors selling to Virginia public institutions. Your conformance report read as a buyer reads it, your roadmap assessed against the statute that now requires one, and the contract terms you will be asked to accept. For vendors.
Two weeks
Method
Three stages, run in order. You cannot trace what you have not found, judge what you have not traced, or govern what you have not judged.
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Inventory
We collect what you hold and record it: every document, its format, its condition, when it was last touched, and who owns it. Most organizations have never seen this list, and producing it is frequently the first finding.
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Trace
Each document is coded against the authority it claims, whether statute, regulation, guidance, or internal policy, and every citation is traced to source and checked against the current text. We record when we checked and what we checked against.
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Report
What is broken, what is stale, and where your own documents contradict each other, ordered by consequence rather than by ease of repair. Delivered in a format meeting WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
The report is not an audit that expires. It is a governed baseline, structured so it can be re-evaluated when the authorities underneath it change.
No assertion reaches a client deliverable unless its source was retrieved during the engagement and the retrieval logged with a date.
Your documents and the model we build from them are yours. We keep our method and our index of public law. We do not retain, license, or resell client material.
What we do not do. We are not lawyers and we do not give legal advice. We are not an accessibility remediation firm: we do not remediate, audit, or certify conformance, and we do not represent that our work produces compliance with any legal requirement. We run automated checks to orient a review and report them with the tool, the ruleset and the date, but a review is not a conformance determination. Those are separate disciplines, and an institution facing a deadline usually needs all three.
Practice
The founder spent twenty-five years in federal service, ten of them at the National Archives and Records Administration on the governance of authoritative records at scale. The method comes directly out of that work: knowing which document governs, whether it is current, and what happens when the thing underneath it changes.
We are a small practice and we say so. Every engagement is led by the person who will do the work, and we would rather decline than take on more than we can deliver properly.
Accessibility
This site is intended to conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Last reviewed August 26, 2026, across all seven pages.
Automated testing was run against the published site with the IBM Equal Access Accessibility Checker 4.0.31 on its WCAG 2.1 (A, AA) guideline set, and axe DevTools with axe-core 4.12.1 on its WCAG 2.1 AA filter. Neither tool reported a violation on any page. Each page was scanned five times rather than once.
The guideline set is named deliberately. The checker offers five, and they do not measure the same thing: IBM Accessibility 7.3, IBM Accessibility next, WCAG 2.0 (A, AA), WCAG 2.1 (A, AA) and WCAG 2.2 (A, AA). The IBM sets include WCAG 2.2 criteria and rules that map to no success criterion at all. Only WCAG 2.1 (A, AA) corresponds to the standard incorporated by reference at 28 C.F.R. § 35.200. A count published without naming its set cannot be compared to anything.
One exception, recorded rather than suppressed. The home page returned two
violations on the first scan of a session and none on the four that followed. Both concerned an
inline frame with no title attribute. The frame is not in the page source: it is
warmup.html, injected by the Google Fonts loader to force the browser to cache each
font face before rendering, and removed once the fonts are cached. A scan that races the first load
catches it. It cannot be corrected from the page, because the element is not ours and exists for a
fraction of a second.
Both tools additionally flag items a scanner cannot decide alone, between 3 and 28 per page depending on the page's length. They cluster in five places: focus visibility under 2.4.7, whether a styled block of text is acting as a heading under 1.3.1, sensory characteristics under 1.3.3, use of color under 1.4.1, and whether text sized in viewport units resizes under 1.4.4 and 1.4.10. Each was checked by hand on the same date.
Keyboard order and visible focus were confirmed by tabbing every page. Exactly one tabbable element on each page is reported as possibly not visible, and on every page it is the skip link, which is hidden by design until it receives focus. The skip link was confirmed to appear on first tab and to move focus into the main content. Reflow was confirmed in a 320 pixel viewport, at 400 percent zoom, at 200 percent zoom, and at intermediate widths across the layout breakpoints. The status key was confirmed to carry a shape and a word alongside every color, and no instruction on any page depends on shape, size, or position.
A screen reader pass was run in Safari with VoiceOver, which is the pairing macOS users actually run, on every page and on each of the anchored destinations reached from the site's own navigation. Landmarks, heading order, link text read out of context, and continuous reading were all checked. No issue was found.
Automated testing detects a minority of conformance failures under any ruleset, so it cannot establish that a page conforms, and the absence of a finding is not evidence of conformance. The manual pass on this date found a card layout defect on five pages, a navigation footer missing from three, and a link routing to the wrong page, none of which either scanner reported. That is the reason we do not sell a scan.
We publish this because we ask clients to publish one, and it would be difficult to argue for something we had not done ourselves. It also lets you check our work before hiring us.
What we have done
- Semantic structure, one page heading, and a correct heading order throughout.
- Visible keyboard focus on every interactive element, and a skip link to the main content.
- Every text and interface color measured against the 4.5:1 and 3:1 thresholds rather than assumed.
- No information conveyed by color alone. Each status in the key carries a shape and a word.
- Readable and operable to a 320 pixel viewport, at 400 percent zoom, and at 200 percent zoom.
- Motion limited to short color transitions, suppressed where a reduced motion preference is set.
What we have not done
- No independent third-party audit. That claim is our own assessment.
- Not tested against every combination of browser and assistive technology. Two VoiceOver sessions on two pages are not a screen reader audit.
- No user testing with people who rely on assistive technology.
We wanted every color here to carry a meaning rather than a mood. Navy marks authority: a statute, a regulation, a citation that binds. Teal marks a relationship between documents. Green marks something retrieved from source and logged with a date. Red marks a citation that no longer resolves.
That only works if the meaning reaches everyone, so we measured rather than assumed, and several combinations failed. An early teal sat at the same lightness as our green, leaving the two separated by hue alone. Hue is the first thing to go for the roughly one in twelve men with a color vision deficiency, and under simulation our relationship and verified badges became the same color.
We tested candidates across the full range, checking each against a light surface and against every other badge, before settling on this palette. The shapes and labels stay regardless, because color should reinforce a meaning and never carry it alone.
If you meet a barrier anywhere on this site, tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it. You do not need to identify the problem technically: describing what you were trying to do and what happened is enough. We acknowledge within two business days.
Contact
The most useful first conversation is usually thirty minutes about what you hold and what governs it. If it turns out you already have a register and a clear authority map, we will say so and there is nothing for us to sell.
Knowing roughly how many documents are in scope, and whether they are searchable text or scans, makes the first call substantially more useful.