Accessibility, Design, & Technology Committee

Who We Are

The Accessibility, Design, & Technology (AD&T) committee designs, maintains, and develops the Archive of Our Own (AO3).

Our responsibilities include:

  • Big-picture planning on the direction of AO3’s design
  • Planning which code changes will be implemented in which releases
  • Testing new code changes to ensure they behave as expected
  • Rolling out code changes to AO3 to address bugs and implement new features
  • Maintaining the Jira issue tracker to manage individual issues and the code changes associated with them
  • Monitoring server performance in conjunction with Systems and watching for unintended slowness or downtime
  • Informing users about periods of downtime, maintenance, and other technical issues, in collaboration with the Communications committee
  • Publicly announcing and documenting changes to AO3 via release notes

We also engage in a lot of cross-committee collaboration with AO3 Documentation, Policy & Abuse, Support, Tag Wrangling, and Translation. We generally work closely with all AO3-based committees and adjusting AO3’s code is a two-way street—sometimes committees will request changes from us, and sometimes we’ll look into certain changes and consult committees for their expertise, asking them what the best way to implement changes would be.

Internal Structure

AD&T is led by one to two chairs, who manage a team of around 10-20 volunteers in a handful of roles:

  • Software developers develop features, fix bugs, and generally help code the code behind AO3. They usually have experience contributing code before being invited to volunteer
  • Senior software developers, in addition to having coding responsibilities, help with cross-committee work, training new volunteers, feature design, conducting meetings, and other general documentation
  • Liaisons from other committees, such as Support or Tag Wrangling, provide their committee’s perspective when discussing future changes to AO3 code. Liaisons update AD&T on relevant issues facing their committee and help facilitate cross-committee communication when their committee is consulted on potential changes
  • Quality assurance supervisors work with testers from the whole OTW to ensure issues are tested in a timely manner by multiple volunteers

Contributing to AO3’s Code

Contributing to AO3’s code isn’t limited to OTW volunteers. We welcome code contributions from the community: anyone can participate! You can find our Contributing Guidelines and other documentation on Github. Our AO3 project on Jira has a list of issues you can contribute to. If you have a feature request or bug report, please direct it to AO3 Support instead. If you would like to report a security issue, please refer to this entry on our GitHub wiki.

Everyone who contributes code is credited in our release notes! In the release notes you can also see what types of issues have been included in past releases, along with what each issue’s corresponding Jira and Git pull request looked like.

Contact Us

For technical help using AO3, including bug reports and feature requests, please contact Support. For questions or reports about violations of the AO3 Terms of Service, contact Policy & Abuse.

For questions related to code development, you can email us at [email protected].