W3C Accessibility Maturity Model Update
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Transcript
Prado: Okay. thank everybody for joining us this morning. My name is David Fazio. I am the co-chair of the Maturity Model Task force started out as a sub group underneath the test for the guidelines working group and graduated to a task force.
… I wanna start off talking about the reason why we decided to start this group and establish maturity model. In the first place, look at 3 years ago during look at 3 development and this and that there's a lot of issues coming up around dashboard towards around accessibility not being a one and done kind of thing. It's a continuous process that you need to revisit and things of that nature.
… And you know we need to have some sort of mechanism to wrap everything together, to have a some sort of cohesive process for maturity in or not maturing accessibility and accessibility out.
… And we figured that having a maturity model for accessibility would be a great way to do that, because I'm sort of contain everything and
… And there's a lot of maturity models in the world today. You've got maturity models with different kinds of companies and organizations. But a lot of them are really used as sales tools. Right? It's it's used as a tool to probe a potential client and figure out, what kind of services can I provide them as a company and make money? So we wanted to develop an agnostic model. That's not about driving services and revenue, but about making sure that companies think about accessibility from the beginning to the end, and they create organizational maturity and accessibility.
… And that's what a maturity model is. It's a way of defining a process
… tracking that process and measuring it over time. Right? So what we're talking
… sorry to interrupt.
… Okay, okay, alright. Let's see if you can hear me.
… So back to what I was saying.
… Yeah. So maturity model is a way of defining a process.
… tracking it and measuring it over time, and then watching how you grow as an organization in terms of being effective at that process. What we're talking about here is quality assurance, right? And then to me, that's what accessibility really is, quality assurance.
… And so we wanted to create a model that really represented that. And who better to do that than the and our process? If we're an organization that governments come to, companies come to for guidance on how to do these kinds of things. And so we assembled a group from around the world, interested bodies and people with disabilities. We reviewed many different kinds of material models from around the world.
… plucking best practices from each one, and tried to develop a really comprehensive and cohesive product that we think meets the needs of organizations today.
… You need it. Did you have anything to add?
… I think you're doing wonderfully well, thank you. I don't like the phrase, Okay, yeah. So I'm going to go ahead and start sharing my screen of our material model here in just a minute before I do. Do we have any questions so far from anybody?
… Okay.
… thank you.
… Okay. so this is our maturity model.
… So what we've done is we've broken it down into dimensions. An introduction. We've created a sample experimental tracking document for for actually implementing this model.
… And we've we've added an introduction and a lot of use cases so that we can show companies or organizations people that may not be familiar with the maturing model on what it is, how you might use it, and what are some kinds of purposes that it could be used for right.
… So if you go down here to the left side. You see, we've got a status of the document, an introduction about the access Buddy material model. One of the things that we learned from the last publication is that we needed a really short and sweet
… T. Ldr document is what it's called too long. Don't read right? A lot of professionals and people higher up in organizations don't have a lot of time to really dive deep into something to figure out. What is this? What can I do with it. How am I gonna deal with? So we want to create a short, sweet snapshot to let people know really quickly. Here's the here's the the use case for this, this type of a document, what you can do with it.
… why you should use it, how you can use it. So it's a really kind of sort of summarized introduction of a maturity model.
… And one of the biggest things that we did with this new update also is, we revisited our dimensions, and really kind of sort of flush that out really, really, deeply right? So we have with 7 dimensions. I can go through them now.
… They start with communications goes on to knowledge and skills.
… We have support.
… We have ICT development lifecycle, which is all super important. Right?
… We have personnel.
… we have procurement.
… and we have one more, and we have culture. So a lot of conversation in the early stages of this maturing model was around. Whether or not this belongs in the why? Because we're a technical organization, right? We're about the Internet standards and guidance and those sorts of things.
… A lot of people were concerned that this was going to be more Hr resources. Organizational development type, oriented right?
… Well, in order. Wicca Em tells us that you can follow all of the wicca. 2 point. O guidelines 2.1 2.2 when it comes out, whatever, and still develop a product that is largely unaccessible. Why? Because you need to do usability studies and have people with disabilities actually touching that product, to see whether or not it works for them.
… Same thing goes in the workplace right? If you're developing, or if you want to be accessible and launch anything that is accessible to your audience or to your workforce, if you don't have people with disabilities inside there touching it every step of the way, it will never get there right. So in order to do that, we need to create an organization that allows people with disabilities and supports them in that workplace to be able to do that.
… And every epsilon of the organization from secretaries, the janitors, the developers, vice presidents, and whatever.
… So in order to do that, you need need to have the culture that supports disability, inclusion. You need to have personnel hiring practices that you know, support people with disabilities and coming into the workplace.
… knowledge and skills, training them up, skilling them up, but also filling up the personnel that, you know doesn't have disabilities in those types of things, understanding, building, inclusion, understanding, and digital accessibility and all these sorts of things. So because of that, we decided that our scope should be more expansive than traditionally recognized. An organization like the which is super super technical.
… I mean, does anybody think that that might be an issue? Or do we all think that that would be a good thing.
… I don't think it would be an issue. Well, but I also don't necessarily know that it's a good thing
… please celebrate.
… I can't elaborate at the moment I'm just, I'm not certain that I can attest to the state that you just made. Which is this is
… the reason why it makes sense to do this in a W. 3. Speak context in my mind.
… Okay, we haven't taken consensus vote on this. So in my mind, is because in today's world, everything an organization does. Whether your major corporation, a small size business, something in between educational everything, whether your customer facing
… technology, that's all web any more increasingly your internal employee facing technology. You need a van to go to the retreat for that special brainstorming session of marketing the new product.
… We have analysis, we have criteria
… that we need to satisfy what maturity model gives us is a way to track that over time you can see progress
… hopefully
… and hopefully, because the world is like that, there will be regressions, and you can catch them sooner instead of later. And reverse them. So that's why I think it's a good thing, and that's why I wanted to make sure that this moved forward, and
… I knew super cool that you may or may not know the flow state
… psychological flow in order to get into the flow state, the best data being in your life where you feel fulfilled, then you're doing something meaningful. And it's just everything clicks and everything's working. And you don't want to stop. You need to have transparency. You need to know what you're doing have clear, concise instructions
… and and feel like you understand what you're doing. You need to have feedback need that feedback. Knowing. Okay, I'm making progress. I'm doing things correctly. This is right, it's working or whatever. And then you need to know where you're gonna go. After that you need to be able to see the results. Well, how do you do that?
… A maturity model? So by implementing a maturity model, you're putting your people into the psychological flow state of the in accessibility. And you think of anything more cool and more innovative than doing that as a product. You're developing products. Your, your, your people are just zoning out and like oh, accessible in accessible out.
… Sorry. I'm getting a little bit nerdy here, but that's that's the essence of the Flow State. If we're talking about getting companies to do accessibility without having to slap them in the face, and punish them, or something like this. This is a way to do it. There's other organizations that are doing something somewhat similar, but not as robust, or even is quality driven is what we're doing.
… And one of them. Not not that I'm talking trash about anybody, but one of those organizations is disability in I don't know how many of you are familiar with it. It started out as the United States business Leadership network. Nobody knew what that meant, and it started to grow. So they rebrand rebranded and became disability in a global nonprofit that corporations love right now, right? Any of you work for corporations. You're probably a member
… and disability and partnered with Aapd, the American Association of People with disabilities. They created a document that's somewhat like a mature model. It's called the Disability Equality Index. And it's the Caret method. So people participate in this disability quality index to see if they're supporting disability, inclusion in their workplaces by participating in conferences and sponsoring people with disabilities.
… doing things internally or whatever, and if you score an 80% or higher, they blast it out all over the Internet. I scored an 80 year, this or that in my Pdi on the best place to work for people with disabilities.
… These companies love that stuff and they continue to do it. And if you don't get a good score. It just wait until you do right. But it's a it's a driver to do these sorts of things. That's sort of the structure of a maturity model. They just don't have the components, like we do of actually measuring a process. And those kinds of things right? So it's the same kind of system, and we know it works cause we've seen it works. And we see these companies excited about doing it.
… This is a better way to do it for accessibility, and that's why we've done it, and that's what it can do and what it does. Yes, Lionel, I don't see to go left, so please speak up if you're to my left, anyway.
… Irc.
… and we need someone to take over scribing, for I know Lionel's been you're welcome. Charles is now going to present his experience within implementing the maturity model at penite. Small business.
… Yeah, we're only about 60 people, the name of the company in minutes. Yeah.
… right? Work.
… Okay? So
… I went as I was mentioning to every department, and gave blank templates of this excel spreadsheet to to our departments here
… within benitech, and some departments decide like the engineering decide, do it on their own but customer support, who actually makes up a lot of our disabled folks at Benitech
… wanted
… guidance. So we scheduled 3 sets of meetings. The first one was 2 h.
… and in that 2 h, because we were getting to know the maturity model.
… We, we work on the support tab Support dimension in the the model. And that took us pretty much that entire meeting.
… the second meeting. Actually, we're able to do 2 more dimensions that took an hour and a half.
… and then the final The final meeting was only about an hour, and we've finished the remaining 4 dimensions getting through all 7.
… Now our findings were that
… in the customer support team
… a number of different dimensions were not applicable.
… so like the ICT cycle, was not applicable for the support group.
… And I believe in procurement also was not applicable when going through. So we basically went through each one of these things, saying that each one was not applicable.
… and and and result the whole, the whole tap. Whole dimension was not equitable.
… But if I go to the support tab here, which was the most relevant, and I think there's there's a
… a table in our in our specification right now. That actually sets for support. Customer support
… support would be the number. One thing communication would be another one, and personnel would be another dimensions out of the top dimensions other dimensions might be relevant, and you can go through them and figure out which of the specific
… proof points so for every dimension we have a number of different what we call proof points here which are questions that you would answer
… so like we went through here.
… We have written policy regarding providing employee accommodation. We have no activity on that meaning. We. We don't have anything in the customer support that addresses this particular proof point. So in that one, we're not scored very well because we we didn't even start it without nothing. And
… in here we have these different statuses from the inactive stage.
… Okay,
… all the way. And we move to the right. And here to the launch stage, meaning we've we've done something. And then we continue on to the integration stage, meaning where we've actually started it. We're we're continuing it and it's getting more mature. And then the final stage is in the optimization where you're fine oil machine. And you know you're reviewing.
… You're doing this on a yearly basis. You're checking things. And at that point you would say that you know, if you've completed anything, and then for any place you're at, you can give a note here. So we went through this and wrote, you know where we were for every one of these proof points, either some were not applicable
… for this group, others were, and then we figured out, well, where are we in this? In our maturity. Here is this from the inactive or active stage to
… To the to the integration stage? Or are we in the optimization stage
… and the idea here and then. So it you fill that all out. And then at the end, you get down and you get a score
… based on what your results were. And so what we can use this for is planning for next year for this department. If they want to put some personal arsen department goals to improve their accessibility, and they could take a couple of these proof points
… and work on them for the next year, so that there's overall score would be improved.
… and so that was the idea. This is the first time that you know. II joined the team last year from hearing David at one of these breakout sessions
… and join the team, thinking, this is great because there was things that like we didn't have an accessibility policy. I'm like, Oh, my gosh.
… so because it would point out in here. And I'm like, Okay, that's something I could start. So I actually wrote it up and then submitted it. And now we're it's an upper management there, looking through and actually going to add it to the employee handle
… as part of that is a big document. So this thing is pointing out things that you just don't think about when you're a small company or a growing company. Exactly right?
… so you know. And for this for the the customer support in the support tab their main focus area, they support 52.7. So
… and there these are folks that are that are using braille devices. Have different types of disabilities, and we're thinking they they should have scored like close to 90 plus percent. Right? And we're like, Wow, this was eye opening for us.
… We we need to look at this and figure out. how do we improve our own accessibility?
… So this was an eye opener for me, and you know we'll find out from every department like it. I'm working with them, going through it right now.
… And you know, finding some results where they're like. That's a good idea. We need to improve on this point, you know.
… you know, some of them were not applicable. And we're like are these? Maybe there might be too many proof points. And so it's too time consuming like 5 h
… for one department just to spend doing this is is this reasonable
… we're expecting next year, when we go through it again to be a lot quicker, because we'll be able to say, Oh, that's what this was talking about.
… This is what we had last year. Where do we rank? Are we better, worse for same spot? So and then to your point, Kevin, about, can you then bubble this up to the top level. I don't know yet. Still grabbing all of these from the departments and then figuring out, Okay, how am I going to now? See each department. And do I aggregate all of this scores and and try to come up with an overall benefit score for each one of these dimensions?
… That's probably what I'm gonna try first, and to sort of see if that works. But right now we don't have anything. They're all in separate spreadsheets.
… So, anyway, that's that's fine.
… Yeah. And I would say that we're only in our second iteration of this document, and that is one that is, when the next priority is figuring out this form system, and how we want to do it, how flexible we want to make it those kinds of things. And thank you very much, Charles, for being willing to share that experience with us, and for actually using the model that's really important
… for people to hear?