Room 504: Looks like we've got a small in-person group today, but that's fine. We'll go ahead and get started. Thank you, everyone, for coming. My name is David Fazio. I am the co-facilitator of this task force, the Maturity Model Task Force. We are structured underneath the Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group. And our, charter is to work on a maturity model for accessibility that can be used to evaluate the… your processes and capabilities to be accessible to your internal employees, as well as to produce accessible products and services and those sorts of things. And if you would like to reach to me after this presentation, here's my, contact information. My GitHub handle is helixopp. That's H-E-L-I-X-O-P-P. My email address, down here, dfazio at helixopp.com, so that's my first initial, my last name, D-F-A-Z-I-O at helixopp.com.

Room 504: And I can go ahead and get started. Certainly. We're going to start out by talking about what exactly is an accessibility maturity model. And I don't know who is or is not familiar with maturity models in general. But a maturity model is a way to really assess your capabilities and your abilities to do something, to do a process correctly, efficiently, repeatedly, and that sort of thing. It's a little bit like quality assurance, right? So, it measures what level of effectiveness that you are at in the journey to being good at doing something.

Room 504: Okay? And it's typically divided into dimensions. Or aspects of a process, or something to that effect, right? And you need to know what your critical elements that you need to focus on to be efficient or to be good at doing something in order to know what to evaluate, what to look for, and that sort of thing. So what the maturity model does is it provides you with a roadmap on what pillars do I need in place in my organization to do a certain process, or to do a specific skill, or whatever well, okay? So, with accessibility, that's been kind of a big barrier for people, okay? Not only is accessibility incredibly difficult to understand, but people don't know where to get started. how do I get started in my journey to being an accessible organization, to being accessible to my employees, and also to providing accessible products and services? So what we've done is we've gotten this team together.

Room 504: And we've defined what that would look like, what the different pillars or aspects of a company you need to look at are, and those are our dimensions, and there's 7 of them. And then, how do you measure it? Okay, what does it look like? What is… what will I see happening? If we are doing this well, or even better, or if we're doing it the best. So that's what a maturity model and the accessibility maturity model does. We define the elements of a business process that you need to focus on, and we let you know what it looks like if you're just starting to think about it. If you just started some activities to be good at it, if you're doing pretty well at it, or if you're doing the best you can possibly do at this process, okay?

Room 504: We have four levels of maturity in the maturity model. Starts, of course, with inactive, meaning we're not really doing anything, we've started to talk about it, maybe, but there are no real efforts to being accessible. Then it goes into the launch stage, okay? So we just started doing things, we're putting some effort into being… into producing accessible products and services. And then we've got another stage called Integrate, where we're doing pretty well, we've got a lot going on, we have plans to be accessible, and we're following through on those plans, but we're just not there yet. And then there's an optimized stage, where we're doing things really well, we've got a good flow going, it's pretty reliable, it's repeatable, and those sorts of things. So each dimension of processes has these levels of maturity within them, and we provide a definition For what it looks like in your organization if you're at this level, okay?

Room 504: That's what the Accessibility Maturity Model is. And it is standard agnostic, meaning it's not tied into the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, it's not… it's not tied into ISO, standards. It's not tied into any specific type of standard. What it does is it tells you what needs to be happening or occurring in your organization for you to be doing well. And you can apply whatever standard you want to in order to make that happen.

Room 504: I hope that… and if you have any questions at any time while I'm talking, please don't hesitate. Yes, come on in. This is for maturity model. We are an IRC channel maturity hashtag, or a hashtag, maturity-model. And my name is David Fazio. Oh, is that Mike? Yes. David Fazio. Co-facilitator of the maturity model, so… Yeah, we're just talking about what the maturity model is the basics of it, basically, you know. So, as I was mentioning, we've defined seven pillars of processes that we believe we need to really focus on and pay attention to in order to make sure your organization is accessible to its employees, but also producing accessible products and services to the public. Right? You know, it's measuring your effectiveness, you're not looking for a score, you're just looking for visibility, okay? You're looking internally at what are you doing and what do you need to do in order to be good at this, in order to evolve and to be efficient, you know? And we do that by defining different levels of maturity, which are basically just statements of, this is what it looks like, this is what you will see, this is what will be occurring in your organization or whatever, in the process. If you are at this level.

Room 504: And if you're familiar with maturity models, that's basically what they do, right? So we've, We've made it standard agnostic. I just kept uncovering that, so it's not tied into any specific standard, like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, it's not tied into any ISO standard, or something to that effect. You can reach these levels in any way that you see fit. And it's also future-proof, in case there is some magic standard that pops up in the future that we didn't anticipate.

Room 504: There's a question on that. There's a tendency in the W3C to try and integrate with other standards, that there's any interoperability, so I'm just… I understand the value of being as generic as possible, but it's also… it's going against what I've heard or understand to be the tendency to try and reinforce each other's guidelines.

That brings us to the next slide.

Room 504: Why the Accessibility Maturing Model? Here we go, okay? It's just kind of some brief history as well, okay? I started this maturity model group as a subgroup of the Silver Task Force back in 2020, early 2020. We started as a subgroup of the Silver Task Force, which, for those of you that don't know, was where WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 3.0 originated, and was sort of getting the early exploratory stages being done to it before the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group took it up in full and made it a full-time thing. And back in late 2019, there was a group of us that were talking about how there is no real, metro… there's no requirement for accessibility to be something that is repeatedly done. It's basically a one-and-done kind of thing, and people look at it that way. We wanted to build in a mechanism that influenced or told people that you have to continuously improve on this process, and do it over and over again. So I propose we create a maturity model, and we integrate it into WCAG 3.

Room 504: Bad idea, especially at that time. Well, bad idea to try to integrate it into WCAG 3, because it didn't exist. There still isn't a WCAG 3. So it's really hard to integrate something into something that's still being built and evolving, or whatever. And it's also difficult to make this a normative specification. We started in those early stages with that intent, that we were going to integrate it into WCAG 3, and at a certain point, we realized that that's probably not the best way to go, so we detached it from WCAG and just made it a maturity model in general.

Room 504: Let's just talk briefly for the, just to make sure, normative, define how that is expressed within W3C.

Room 504: Yeah, a normative statement or document is something… is a state of being, basically, so it's either true or false, it exists or it doesn't. And in order to be a specification or a standard, it must be normative. Right, you must be able to test it, measure it, and repeat it. It's not that you can't do this with the maturity model, but one of the concerns of our group is that if we made it a normative document and a standard or a specification, that that would turn a lot of people off from using it in general. A lot of people just, they wouldn't want to be tied into something where they have to make a certain score or something to that effect. And that's all fine and good.

Room 504: And the other reason why this maturity model was needed is because, we did explore other existing maturity models, because let's be honest, they do exist. Every single consulting company on Earth has one, basically. But what we realized, or what we know, is that more often than not, these maturity models are not only hidden behind paywalls, for instance, ISO standards and stuff like that, so they're not free to everyone, so they can't be widely used, and that sort of thing. But also, they're often used in sales techniques, as a discovery probe. We'll do this maturity model for you so we can see what you need from us. What kind of consulting services, what kind of tooling, or whatever. So we wanted to take a W3C approach to that, and say, this is what we, as an international body of experts and professionals, believe are the specific pillars of accessibility that you need to focus on in your organization. The processes, right? Not technologies, not activities, but the processes that are going on within most, if not all, organizations that need to be focused on, and then these are the certain aspects of those processes and what they look like. If you're doing, accessibility, or you're able or capable of achieving accessibility, and that sort of thing. So that's kind of how we all got started with this.

Room 504: Let's see here. And also, having an approved or, for lack of a better term, endorsed W3C maturity model does go a long way. Whether it becomes a legal thing or not, embedded into legislation or whatever, it carries a lot of weight with it. Now, I probably need a disclaimer here. A note is not where we've been published as a group note. So, technically, it's not W3C endorsed, per se. We would have to become a W3C statement in order to be officially W3C endorsed. But it is a W3C publication.

Room 504: And there's enough horizontal review in the process of getting… becoming a note that it is… it is still a referenceable document that has the clout of the W3C behind it.

Room 504: Thank you. I'm glad I didn't have to say that.

Room 504: I'm coming at this from the Web Sustainability Guidelines, which are also trying to go up and build… sorry, interest groups, they're trying to go off and build a note. So, and the note is a relatively new concept within the W3C, but I do think that it's worth stating that there is… it is not just a web page or a community group document, there is actually clout behind that.

Room 504: And that was… we did face some opposition at first, before we became a task force about the about this trajectory and sort of thing, right? But as we started to grow and to evolve, that's what people began to to slowly realize there is a lot to this, it does carry a lot of weight, and even before we published as a note, when we were just an editor's draft, We had government and I'm not supposed to say governments, but we had government employees in Australia, the Netherlands, and many places around the world using our editor's draft internally to run maturity model assessments. We can't say their governments were running it, that's how I like to put it the government of Australia did it, but their employees, which of course need to get permission from their bosses, who are government officials. They've been doing it since we were in editor's draft, and we've got a ton of email trail in our public list about how they're glad the W3C is doing this. They've been looking for a W3C stamped you know, and of course, it's not endorsed until it becomes a statement, but, and we were very happy to hear that to validate, our sort of, our approach and that sort of thing. So for you as well, that's some stuff for you to take back to your group, it does make a big difference, and people do look to the W3C to lead, especially in this respect, right?

Room 504: We realized that it wasn't a good idea to tie it into WCAG 3 or WCAG in general. We wanted it to be open and broad a big thing about at least WCAG2, and in general, is to not make it technology-specific, to future-proof it, to allow it to evolve and to grow if something else happens in the future, right? So, you're right that it is kind of a good practice to keep it all, like, in the ecosystem of W3C work.

Room 504: Well, it's not that this can't be applied to WCAG and this and that, it's just that we're making sure that it's broader than that, so that it's kind of like open source, right? So it can cover multiple angles and that sort of thing. And then I can get to other… we're not done with just a no. We're not done with a non-normative specification, but we'll get into that in a little bit. I think that's all I want to say about that.

Room 504: But, but it all started about just people concerned that we don't really have any sort of requirement or suggestion that you don't just do an accessibility test and you're done. But it has to be something that's continuous improvement, and that's the goal for the maturity model.

Room 504: Any other questions so far?

Room 504: Did you talk about, I mean, Sherry Bernheiber was involved with this at one point? Yeah, she's my co-facilitator. Okay, excellent. And she's also created the one that was with Level Access. Yeah, she was… she was a part of the DAM team, yeah. Which is… which is a great name, but But the that's what I think that most people are more familiar with, since there was quite a lot of promotion around that, and but I think it's good that there's… that there's an independent that's free of copyrights, that's going to be something that can be used by others.

Yeah, so if you want me to get into those details, I can. Sherry and I are very close, so we've been working together on accessibility for at least 10 years now.

Room 504: Yeah, she's my buddy. But anyway, Sherry was a part of Level Access's creation of the, what is it, Digital Accessibility Maturity model of the dam. And then we've also got another individual by the name of Jeff Klein, who was responsible, or part of the team that did the PDAA, I don't really remember what that stands for, but it's, Texas, or the… it's the Texas Maturity model. Yeah, it's their maturity model, and it's more focused on procurement, because Jeff's a procurement guy. And we had a colleague from the Netherlands, Raf DeRoys. Who, he was, in the Netherlands government, and this and that, or Dutch, I can't… items. He's a part of the Dutch government, for sure. Yeah, yeah, something to that effect, and he's a part of maturity models as well. He hasn't been able to participate as much lately, but in the early stages, he was in the middle of everything, and that's the great thing that we wanted to do, is we wanted to bring these subject matter experts, and if I'm talking too fast, please slap me upside the head. Okay. But, we wanted to bring in all of these global subject matter experts to contribute, like W3C does. It is our ethos, right? And to get to something that didn't have an ulterior motive. But is just solely, purely focused on being able to do accessibility, internal and external.

Room 504: And we're hopeful that that's what we've achieved, and the majority of our feedback so far has been that, yes, we are on the right track, and that that is what we are successfully doing.

Room 504: Yeah, it's wonderful.

Room 504: Sherry's my co-facilitator.

Room 504: I knew that she was involved, but I wasn't… I wasn't sure if she was still involved.

Room 504: Yeah, so when I… when I decided to create the subgroup, she's the first person I reached out to. I said, hey, you want to run this with me? She said, hell yeah. Excellent. And then she found Jeff, and she knew Jeff, and so we looped him in, and then Jake and I, Jake Aubma, which you probably know, yeah, we found, Jake knew Raph, and we brought him in, and then… anyway, so we all basically basically did our recruiting part and brought in a bunch of people. And if you want to join, you're welcome. Thank you. You don't have to come every day, but you can show up when you want.

Room 504: Appreciate that.

Room 504: We meet Wednesdays, 8 a.m. Pacific time. Yeah, 8 a.m. Pacific. Alright, let's go on to the next slide.

Room 504: So, maturity model status. Like many of you hopefully know, we finally got our group note published on the 4th of November 2025. Like I mentioned, this is a technical report, it's not a standard, it's not a specification. Which means it's not officially W3C endorsed, which, like Mike was saying, it doesn't give it less clout, or… I guess it kind of does, but it still has enough clout to be useful, and so…

Room 504: Tiara, please join. Yes. I mean, that's it for this slide. That's where we're at.

Room 504: Alright, let me skip to the future, and then we'll go back to how to use it. Okay, so… What we want to do with the maturity model. So, like I mentioned, we detached it from standards, we made it agnostic, and it is a note, but that doesn't mean we don't want to explore normative applications. there's some pessimism and doubt as to whether or not this could ever be normative, or if it could apply to WCAG, but I think it can. There's ways to do it, and that's probably going to be part of the next charter. For us. And I think our next charter is in a couple years, or maybe… I think it's in 2027, but… So right now, we do got the note. We're not done with it, so we'll probably have a 1.1, maybe 1.2. There's some things that we could do to make the document more readable, probably, and more usable for smaller organizations, people that are less technical. that sort of thing. We got about 20-some-odd GitHub issues that we want to get cracked out and finished right now, and it is my aspiration to move towards a W3C statement, okay? And a W3C statement is that official endorsement. It's the highest endorsement that a document can get without being a specification.

Room 504: Okay, in order to be a specification. I mean, if you're working on WCAG3, you know it's tough to become a specification, and I… I don't even think that… I'm not even sure that would be the right route for us to be a specification, so we don't know.

Room 504: But I think the first step, the first goal should be to get that W3C statement status, to get that official endorsement. One of the things we also want to do, and for those of you that are familiar with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, you may know, that there's something called WCAG EM, that's E for ECHO, M for Mary, and that's, I believe that's for, evaluation methodology. And if you, go to the WCAG EM site, there's a little tool that they have available to the public, where you can go through an accessibility conformance report, and at the end of it, save that document that you've produced through that WCAG EM tool to your local hard drive. I mean, it's not something that you can probably do to run an accessibility consulting company, or that you could probably do… use to to do your accessibility efforts for your company, but it is a nifty little tool that is useful. It teaches you how to use the document, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and I'm not sure how far you can go with it, but it… you can use it, right? I mean, yeah, it's totally usable.

Room 504: Actually working on producing HIDI, and somebody else is working on updating it to include some other other things, because it still talks, I believe, about WK 2.0, but there's a community group for me to go off and to update that note, whatever the WK EM is. But the… there's nothing to stop people from using WK EM now, and it's something that is more targeted at evaluating how, how effectively a organization implements a website than it is something like a VPAT, which is another form of Accessibility Conformance Report, but that's more geared towards, looking at procurement, as is OpenACR, which is a standard that, or, a document format that I've created with… to support the U.S. federal government, so there's similar kinds of accessibility conformance reports, but for different purposes.

Room 504: Right, right. And producing a document like this is hard for… it can be difficult for people to digest and understand what to do with it, right? So, how do we score? People want to know scores, right? They think I'm evaluating something, I should get a score, whatever. So we decided that we wanted to create some type of tool, tracking tool, scoring tool, whatever you want to call it so that the public can use it, so they can see, how do I implement this? How does it work? What does implementation look like?

Room 504: We know consulting companies, mine included, are going to want to create their own tools, right? They're going to want to use this as a wireframe, and to do something like a WCAG auditing tool, or whatever, but then there's going to be a lot of people that just want to know what to do, how to do it, how to use it, right? So that's what we're thinking in terms of creating a tool, and the first thought that came to my head was WCAG EM. We could do something similar to that. We don't know what it's going to look like yet. So that's in our future as well.

Room 504: But I honestly think that we should wait until we get that statement status before we pursue building the tool. And the reason why I think that we should do that first is because we know we have a very stable document if we get WCAG statement status. We know it's been thoroughly vetted and reviewed by the advisory board by working groups and this and that, and we know it's concrete enough that it's stable enough that we should build tooling around it, right? Because if we do that ahead of time, we might be getting ahead of ourselves, and it may not be as, it may not work as well, you know? So I I could get outvoted on this, but and I could be wrong, but to me, that seems the right way to do it. And that's how I feel we should be approaching this. So what would the tool accomplish? It would… so the smaller companies, for instance, they don't know what to do or how to do it, so you can read a document that has steps, but then you're like, okay, how do I implement, right? You know, and so the tool would be the implementation portion of it, like WikiM's tool, right? So the tool would just… So, it would be mostly a tracking tool, so… and we'll get to this when I talk about how to use the maturity model.

Room 504: But we right now have a spreadsheet link in the document that some people have been using to track their evaluation process of the maturity model. We use this spreadsheet as more of a, what did I call it? It's like a feasibility check, like to validate our MVP. Reference point. Yeah, it's a reference point it's not something that's been intended for people to use to actually do the maturity model. We used it to make sure what we're doing, to test our efficacy, right? Does this work? And it does. Right? So, a lot of organizations read this and they go, okay, so now what do I do? And all you're really… all you're really doing with the maturity model is you're looking at statements of levels and stages in each process, right? For instance launch stage there's been some work… some talk about doing accessibility, but no real formalized kind of sort of activities have… have, materialized that.

Room 504: That's what's going on in our organization? I don't know, let me check. So you can query different people in the organization. Has anyone talked about accessibility? Yes. Okay, what have they said? Send me the documentation, right? You receive that documentation, then what do you do with it? Well, you can put in line items, and these are what we've done, whatever, whatever, whatever, to sort of support the statement that we are in that launch stage, okay? Well, how do you prove that? Take those documents, upload them into a database, say a Dropbox or a share folder, link the statements to that, whatever, right? And that's how you can do something like that, right? I know this because I've done the work, right? You know? But people that aren't familiar with technology, people that aren't familiar with maturity models, small businesses, they may not know that. We provide them a tool that… we're not going to provide them a tool that does all that, because as a W3C, we can't… the W3C cannot host data for other people and stuff like this. But it can help you sort of formalize your activities so you know what it looks like and how to do it, and give you that concept so you can do it on your own. Like with WCAG EM, so what I just described, you would put those statements in the tool, and then you would say, okay, these are documents that I have, and I'm going to print out a report, or save a report that's like a spreadsheet.

Room 504: this is everything I entered, now let me find somewhere to store that documentation and link it.

Room 504: And with tools like WK EM and the ATAG tools, the other tools that the WC3 is building, as far as I know, none of them are… at least the ones that I've looked at are not saving anything anywhere, they're just… you're able to go off and store something on your hard drive, but otherwise, if you walk away from it and close the browser, the data is lost. Exactly.

Room 504: So basically what we're talking about is almost like a tutorial, right? You know? And that's fine, because we're not in the business of building things for people to, you know. Yeah, dude, software for people to use that I know of, anyway. So, and my team's volunteered to head that up, so my Helix Opportunity team, so we're doing a lot of this, groundwork for it.

Room 504: But yeah, so that's… that's the idea for that. And then, so once we… once we get the statement status and get this tool built, the next step is to explore normative applications for… for the maturity model. This may mean that we take the group note, and it becomes a W3C recommendation, which is what… which is the specification route, which is the WCAG route, and stuff like that, or it may mean that we have two separate versions. we have a note, a group note for everybody to use, and then we have another normative document that specifically correlates with WCAG in some way, shape, or form, or it stands on its own, right? And I think that's not a bad idea, because you have one document that everyone can use, and another document that government entities or whatever standards bodies can cite, refer to and embed in their, in their legislation and, and whatever. But we won't know that until we start doing that exploration, and that's a difficult task to do, so that's why we're not going to do it until we get this stuff done first. I think this is kind of the immediate…

Room 504: And we found out the hard way during our CFC, our call for consensus, to get the approval to publish, that the WCAG group wants this integrated into WCAG 3 somehow, so we do need to have more discussions around that. Of which we haven't had yet. So since… we were originally formed as a subgroup under the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group, and then in 2021, I think, we went under Accessible Platform Architectures when we became a task force. But since that happened, we haven't had much communication at all with AG in this document, and it would have been premature anyway, I think. But now's the time to really start thinking about it, now that we're a group note, and WCAG3 is progressing and evolving or whatever, so we can see what we can keep in line. But that's more towards the normative exploration, normative exploration, timeframe.

Room 504: Before I go to how to use the document, does anyone have any other… Questions anyone talk about?

Room 504: Some spreadsheet inside the… The maturation model that can support us in, the flow. applying it to our entire organization?

Room 504: Yeah, just don't try to score things, right? There is no score. So what… and that's all maturity models in general. What you're using it for is for visibility, to take a deep look. what is your organization doing, or the organization that you're evaluating? So, for instance, communications. In terms of communications. What are we doing that affects accessibility? How are we doing it? What does the evidence suggest to us where we're at in this evolution of the process? Are we doing it just a little bit? Are we not doing it at all? Are we pretty far advanced? And that sort of thing. So you're looking at it to open up the eyes and the visibility of what the work the organization is doing towards a goal. And bringing that to people that care about it, and they themselves make their own sort of judgment calls to, is this representative of who we are as an organization? Is this a standard we're setting for ourselves, or do we want to aim higher? But there's no score of 5 out of 10, or anything like this. It's all about visibility.

Room 504: So it's guided, though?

Room 504: So it's guided, though? Yeah, it's guided, yeah. So you can use the spreadsheet for that. The spreadsheet is not intended to be the tool that we're referencing that we're going to build. Like I said, we use that spreadsheet to just test our work, to make sure that this made sense, to make sure that you could possibly somehow put this into practice and that sort of thing.

Room 504: Alright, so let's go into how to use the accessibility maturity model. Okay, so… and actually, to do this, let me just actually go to the maturity mode. Okay, as part of the feedback we got during our clarif… during our call for consensus. is there was a request to put in some sort of, like steps on how you could use a maturity model, because it wasn't clear enough to people, and we did do that. So if you go to the left-hand navigation pane down here, we've got how to use the accessibility maturity model. And these are… this is what we put in here. So, each dimension includes a short description of maturity levels, and they serve as benchmarks for evaluating your operations. And the role of an evaluator is to determine which maturity level is supported by the proof points within your organization for each dimension, okay? So, proof point is basically evidence. What documentation, what emails, what conversations can I… can I point to that have taken place to support me saying that I am in the integrations… the integrate stage, or the launch stage, or the inactive stage of this level of maturity? That's what you're doing. So you're looking at the statements of the levels of maturity, and you're saying, does this apply to my organization?

Room 504: And if it does, do I have evidence to support that? Or you're saying, what's the evidence of what we're doing? Does that support any one of these statements, or which statement does it support? That's the role of the evaluator, okay? That's where we start. And an example of this is right underneath. So, for example, in the communications dimension, you're at the launch stage if the organization has written plans in place to make internal and external communications accessible. And this means that you should be complying with any applicable accessibility regulations. Those plans probably haven't materialized into cohesive… into a cohesive cross-organizational roadmap. If you were to claim this level of maturity for your communications dimension, then the proof points that you uncover during your evaluation to support this claim Then the proof points that you uncover during your evaluation must support this claim. And we provided a sample of applicable proof points that may be used, and proof points are extended and… can be extended as well. The proof points that we provide in this document, we're not saying this is what you have to do. We're saying these are examples of what would, of what you could have… being taking place in your organization, and what you could refer to, that support these statements. You can use other examples, or you could have other evidence, but this is just to kind of sort of give you an idea of what you might be looking for.

Room 504: And WCAG is the same way. It tells you, here's some no… here's some known, fixes for the success criteria, or some known ways to make this accessible, but there could also be others, right? This isn't an exhaustive list. So the same thing with the maturing model. The proof points we provide are examples of what it might look like. But you could have your own that are completely different. And it's up to you as the evaluator to make that subjective call. Does this support my statement? And that's it.

Room 504: And then we have some recommended steps to get started. And if you guys have comments on whether or not this is useful, or makes sense, or we should edit it, or whatever, please do let me know. We're making notes here as well. If we could make this more, if we could make it better, we're more than happy to. If it's confusing, also, it's good to know.

Room 504: Alright, so the recommended steps to get started, and this comes from Sherry's, level access work, but, Form a review team. That's step one, right? So, this includes cross-functional representatives, as maturity depends on collaboration. Two, gather evidence. So, you want to collect documentation, training data, and metrics to reflect in current, not aspirational practices, right? So we're talking about what the organization is currently doing, what is currently taking place, not what we have planned for the future. You want to validate your findings, which means engaging experts, hopefully people with disabilities as well, to confirm accuracy and credibility. You want to create a corrective action plan, which means defining goals, milestones. process owners, stuff like that, timelines, and existing systems. Yeah, you want to reassess things regularly, so we talked about continuous improvement not being a part of WCAG. Reassess regularly, continuous improvement. Get back in there, do it over, rinse and repeat that sort of thing.

Room 504: what are your plans on setting this up so that it deals with smaller organizations? Because, like, this is written for a VMWare scale of organization.

Room 504: How? That's the second time… We've got, I don't want to name names. I probably could, because we all know each other, but, so there's a bunch of smaller consulting individuals that are using this, right? You know, so we've got one-person shops and one-person people, and stuff like that using it, and they're not… and they're not even necessarily using it for big Fortune 500 companies. They're able to do it, and they're using it. I'm I'm at a loss for seeing how people think this is only for large organizations. So, and I'll explain, right? So, everybody communicates. Right? Okay, everybody has personnel, right? Personnel can be a one-person shop, your own personnel. Everyone has knowledge and skills. Right, so everyone has knowledge and skills, okay? Everyone has oversight over something. If you're a small business owner, you have oversight over everything, which is a pain. You know, so I don't see one process in our maturity model that is only for large organizations.

Room 504: Now, maybe the terminology we use and how technical, like, you need to know is for people that are more advanced in specific types of industries. I could see that, yeah. And we're working on… that's why we did the how-to-use thing, and that was recommended during the CFC process, then that's a good recommendation. But please, if there's a specific sort of thing that you can point us to where you think we need to massage it so that this makes it seem like it's only for large organizations, because maybe we give that impression, but it's not, right? And we haven't… we haven't… We've had one, we've had one issue raised to that effect. But we've had… dozens, if not a dozen or more individuals tell us that they've used it for smaller organizations, right? So, we're at a loss of finding where that point is, you know? Exactly.

Room 504: To put this same question in different words, can you point as parameters or characters that you can… you looked at this model and you realized, okay, this is not for small organizations? Because that is what we are also trying to understand.

Room 504: I think it's just, like, when you were talking about, sort of, bringing together people from different, like, like. So often, the, there's a person who is responsible for… for accessibility, and there isn't necessarily as much of a… Yeah, it's… it's… there… it's hard to go off and connect with others, and there's elements of influence, but not necessarily power, so how do you bring together those people in… who have more… like, your director of design, if you're just the accessibility subject matter expert, you may not have the… you're not the chief accessibility officer, and at the C-suite. directing other people. You're in a position, generally, of of influence, and please just let us do this the right way, as opposed to, thou shalt. Right, and we can't… for… we can lead the horse to the water, right? But we can't make the horse drink, right? So we're providing… so we can't say, so-and-so has to use this document or run the training model, and then you have to listen to them, you know what I mean? That's… that's impossible for us to… but we can't… like I said in the beginning. The biggest problem we get from, especially smaller organizations, is, yeah, we'd love to be accessible, but what the hell do we do? Where do we start? What do I look at? What do I need to know? Here's the roadmap, man. Okay, so communications, for instance, social media. Email. phone, text message, website, right? All communications, right? Personnel, we just talked about that you've got some… we've all got it, right? So, as the small business person, and yeah, we should provide training on this, and that's why we all make money as businesses, right? So we can find ways to provide training and stuff, but but that's what we've done.

Room 504: And so this is… these are the processes you need to make sure you're looking at and paying attention to, okay? And… and this is… these are the different levels you could be at, launch, inactive, launch, integrate, whatever, right? Read through it. and get kind of a bird's-eye view, where do you think you're at? That's one way to do it, okay? I know that we did this, I know we did that. Or query people that work for you. Hey, what are we doing around this? What do let me know. And that sort of thing. And yeah, it's gonna need some CSUN presentations and some more TPAC presentations to really get people up to it, you know? But that's what we've been trying to do, and I'm hopeful and optimistic that we… Yes, sir, I'm sorry.

Room 504: I joined a little bit late, Dan with AT&T. We have a big accessibility Division, basically. (Susan Mazzurou's an old friend. Sorry? Susan Mazzurou's a good friend of mine) I think the point about being focused on large organizations is not really… founded, with the exception of ICT. I think a lot of… Oh, you read it, okay. Unless, unless you're… you're talking about companies that are truly in… in software development that are small shops. Normally, a mom-and-pop shop would outsource this and just get services. And the question is, how do you actually pass this on to your outsourced processes.

Room 504: Yes, sir, I'm glad you brought that up, and I will explain. So, what we also say in this maturity model that is very important. all of these dimensions may apply to you. Right. Right? So, and that's the great thing about it not being scored. You can omit things that don't apply… that don't apply. Some people think that this may, increase the ability to game the system, but no. Right? I mean, this isn't about a system, it's not about a score. Like I said, it's about bringing visibility to stuff that you care about, right? So, I want to do this, what do I need to look at? Where do I start? How do I do it? Okay, so someone has an interest, someone has a vested interest and a genuine care and concern. What… what… what metric do I want to set for myself, okay? Okay, and then you look through it, and you do that. If something doesn't apply, you mark it as doesn't apply. But let's go to the ICT development, right?

Room 504: If we go to ICT… Where is it? Can be alphabetical. Here we go, ICT development lifecycle. Let's go to the stages, right? So this is the meat of it. Every time you look at a dimension, what you really want to be looking at is the stages, okay? Inactive. Okay, you're inactive if no effort has been made, or only isolated efforts have been identified. We should probably, actually build that out a little bit more. Determine what assessment, blah blah blah blah blah. Okay, so… identify on the session proven not. We need to write this up better, I think. Here we go. There is some awareness of the need of accessible ICT development, but it is inconsistently approached or decentralized. Okay, so as a small business, I know that by law, I have to be accessible to participate in government contracts. Let me go find a consulting company to help me. I'm now in. On stage.

Room 504: Let's see here, the accessibility efforts are limited to new products, applications, and websites. So my website that I already have built is inaccessible yet, but I already spent 15 grand on it. I'm not gonna get a new one. Going forward, though, I'm gonna make sure that every company that I, submit, or that I ask to submit bids to me to do my work, I'm gonna make sure that they're providing me with ACRs, accessible conformance reports. I'm going to ask them about, is what you're going to provide me going to be WCAG 2.0 compliant? You know, those sorts of things.

Room 504: I think WCAG has an exception for a lot of things for third-party content and stuff like this, right? You can't force third parties to do things. Remodel doesn't. Doesn't matter who's doing it for you, you can tell people, what you produce for me needs to be accessible, and you're following the stages of the maturity, because now you're aware. Now you're aware that all of your providers need to be providing you things that are accessible, which you may not have been aware of before.

Room 504: And we hope that we've done that with all of the dimensions as well. Communications, for instance. Who's going to be managing my social media? I may be hiring a consultant to do that that's not an employee. Hey, consultant, are you making sure you're using alt tags for the images? Or and stuff like that? So, yeah. And again, this may be where we need to do a blitz of presentations and this and that around the world, which I'm… we're more than happy to do. Provided somebody funds it. But but it's gonna be a learning curve, but we throw all of the questions at us about it not being usable for small organizations, and I'm happy to demonstrate how it can be. And maybe we do YouTube videos. And stuff like that as well. Fortunately, I don't think there's education and outreach, department within, Way Web Accessibility Initiative anymore, so that would probably be something that they could do, but my organization could probably do it as well, and just throw some out there but… But yeah, so we think that it… we think it's pretty sound. But, we're more… and if AT&T wants us to give a presentation or have a discussion about how it could be used for smaller companies as well, or different departments…

Room 504: I think my question was more about, especially with large organizations, there's a lot of SaaS type, engagement. Software as a service, yeah. So even processes. And, and these are ongoing, it's not one of these things where you just kind of… Yeah, you can do it part of the contract, but I'm stipulating that you should follow the best practices and other things, but, I was just curious how the maturity model… I mean, you can do it within your own organization, and I'm… I'm pretty sure the team that is running the show is following many of the steps that you're discussing. It's just that, probably having structured like this, it's the first time I'm… I'm the AC rep, so I'm not necessarily the, accessibility specialist, but, they get to the right people.

Room 504: Yeah, and I… so, I do a lot of work with large organizations internationally, right? And I was very shocked to find out some of the way these organizations approach things. For instance, one company I was asked to recruit an accessibility specialist in India, not for them, but for their contractor. So they were… so they outsourced their IT development for their mobile apps and stuff like this to a company in India that's locally. But that company doesn't have any accessibility professionals, and it was not producing accessible products for them. I was tasked with finding an accessibility professional in my company, in India to work for that company to produce products for the Fortune 500 company, right? And they're gonna pay the salary of the… not… right? So, it makes no sense to me. The onus is on the companies, and we can't force them to do business differently. You know, but they can do it, and they can say, follow this maturity model, right? I mean, that's just business practice and process that is out of our hands, and out of your hands as well, and everybody's. Good work. I mean, I read it, and I got intrigued. Thank you, thank you. I can tell you read it, yeah, thank you.

Room 504: But there is also that organizations, certainly of the size of AT&T, can go out to both their suppliers and their customers and offer this as a service, or suggest it, and then when AT&T is buying products and services, to say, we want to go off and make sure that we're buying from suppliers that have a accessibility maturity model that That aligns with this, and immediately show it with us. We can… we can learn from you and help… there's ways that big, big vendors can… pressure on their supplier community to make things more accessible, improve things for the entire supply chain.

Room 504: Right, and like I mentioned earlier I'm sure there's a lot of small businesses that are pretty upset, companies like, let's say, AT&T or the Googles or whatever, saying that you can't bid on this unless it's going to be accessible or whatever, and like, well, what do I do? I don't know what accessibility is. Now you can say to all the small businesses, and I know for a fact, being an up-and-coming small business 10, 15, 20 years ago, you do a lot of small business-type presentations, working with chambers of commerce and stuff like that. Now you can start doing, small business outreach, and it's not saying, hey guys, you want to bid on our contracts? It needs to be accessible. How do you do it? Here's some guidance. You know, so it makes that outreach even better for you.

Room 504: All right. Thank you. Yeah, we got another 8 minutes for questions. Do we have any queue or anything like that from online? We are having queue only, but online we don't have. Okay, so we got a few more minutes, everybody.

Room 504: I mean, what do you need for help, other than comments and feedback and… Issues. Is there any… One of the biggest things I would say is, support, like, moral support, you know what I mean? Like, damn, oh no, and what? No, but seriously, though. I think from the other work, from the other working groups and the community, it was a bit of a rough CFC process. We got a couple… we only got two objections, but, it kind of took the wind out of us a bit. And, so I just think going forward, just for people to voice their support for this work, and to not be pessimistic about it, and to not say, we don't think this will work, or why are you doing this, why are you doing that, but saying, how can we support you, how can we help which you just did, of course, but that's one thing. please contribute, you know? Don't… you can follow the GitHub and logic and stuff like that, but pop in every once in a while, you know? I think you'd have to join APA as well. I don't know if you are APA or not. No, don't think so. No one will tell you you can't be a part of APA. We take everybody. All the riff-raff. I belong there. Yeah, but no, but yeah, so we're happy to have you contribute, even if it's once or twice, and if there's something that's of particular interest to you, yeah.

Room 504: Practical side, I would say, if you can, apply to, or ask any organization to apply to them, and try to use it, and then give us a feedback. That's important. Because by looking at it, we have worked on it, and we know how it is working, what we have written, but how the person in front of the model is trying to interpret it When they're trying to fit this model into their organization, what kind of difficulties they are facing. So I think that is what, feedback we need. Apart from emotional support, yeah, that you all do. But yes, practically, if we get actual feedback, what are the difficulties? Like, go for smaller organization, one-person organization, 10 to 15, the division that we do, based on the size of employees in that organization.

Room 504: Try to spread this word, and ask them to apply, so that we get a feedback from everyone.

Room 504: Right. Yeah, that is… That was some of the most useful feedback that we did get over the last, like I said, people have been using this for several years already. Intel used it, Goldman Sachs used it and… but lately, those real use cases, now that it's involved in stuff like that, that's been incredibly helpful for us to know what to work on, how to do it, and that sort of… Charles is also there on the Zoom. Yes, Charles, did… did you have something? No, I mean, he used… Oh, Benetech. Benetech actually built a little tool using some AI dev work, or whatever. They popped it out in, like, 24 hours, and they've been running some stuff for Title II of the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, for schools and stuff like that, and it's been pretty successful for them, even though we don't have the whole tracking scoring thing completely you know, tool mapped out yet. It was still useful, they found it incredibly useful, and they had nothing but positive things to say about it, so… The other challenge, of course, is that WC3 is incredibly text-heavy, but what made the level access work that Sherry, did 15, 20 years ago, whenever it was that that was being done, was that it led with a strong visual that easily described what the issue is. And as much as I love the whole web sustain… like, the whole, sorry, the WC Framework and standards guidelines, it's not… it's… this is not a great beginning point to understand what a maturity model is, or how to jump into that. Again, I don't know how you deal with that. Visual workflow?

Room 504: Something just to make it easier for people to quickly, alright, make one for us, you want to help? Damn, gosh! No, no, actually so we talked about doing this with our roadmap. Right. Actually doing some kind of visual journey, kind of, like, whatever. So, no, that would be helpful, yeah, if you could… if you wanted to if you got the time, I don't want to, like, throw some work on you, but you said you wanted to help. Or if you can task it to somebody else that you work with, that's fine, too. But no, I agree that that would not be a bad idea, and we could have… so we have the text version, and the visual aids, and stuff like that. Of course we need to make it accessible, but it may be accessible already, because we've got the text version. If you're just taking the text version and doing a visual aid, then it's… that's alt text for the vision, for the visual. Ideally, you'd have something like an SVG file that has the information structured within it so that it's… She's an SVG accessibility… Yeah, so this is Neha, our main GitHub editor, and my product manager. Marvelous. Yeah, she's awesome. But anyway, but yeah, I don't disagree, I think that would be great,

Room 504: I don't know if anybody on our team and the task force has time and bandwidth to do it, so we would welcome anybody else that wants to.

Room 504: David. Hint, Mike. I think Charles is about… It's Charles. Go ahead.

Charles LaPierre: Hi, hello there. One thing I was just thinking about, that as we… improve our tool, right? To make it more like a web… web-based, offering. to address the issue of small business, that could be, like, part of the setup, where it asks you the size of the organization that's using the model, and potentially it could, could scale maybe the number of questions, and you could have this where things may not apply to a very small business that doesn't have, like multiple different divisions or things of that nature. I would have to look at, like, proof points and things like that to figure it out, but we might be able to start thinking about that, where we could have it scalable.

Room 504: That's an interesting point. So, Intuit the makers of TurboTax and QuickBooks, has something similar for QuickBooks. They have a, they have a small business… not small business, but they have, like, a micro-business version of QuickBooks that is just for, like hustlers, right? You know, the people that are, like, doing side gigs or something like that, like, really small micro-businesses. So it takes what's in QuickBooks Small Business and makes it really just boil down to the basics that they need at that point in time. And I'm a big… I'm a big proponent of point-of-use tooling, lean engineering, Six Sigma, and that sort of thing. You only give people information that they need, when they need it, where they need it, why they need it, how they need it, right? That reduces error, that keeps people focused, and it makes things more manageable, so… Yeah, that's, that's, that's… that's a good idea.

Room 504: Speaking of, Intuit, Ted's been very… and Intuit in general, been talking about accessibility champions for a long time. I don't know if… is it… are champions part of the framework? Is there any sort of element of trying to go off and say that this is a good idea for maturity, if you have a Champions program to change the pro… the culture of the organization? I don't… It's been a while since I've looked at this, alright. So, we have a call… we had… a culture, dimension, but not… I'm not sure that it's… that it's… so we did… we've changed the culture dimension to oversight and governance, now, because we feel like most of what was in there kind of applies to that anyway, and we need that in there. And culture's kind of one of those… it might be already taken care of with all of the other dimensions anyway, you know? So, But there is pieces in the maturity model about having champions, about having executive sponsorship and stuff like that, so it's embedded in there already, maybe not just kind of, sort of, like, header that sort of thing. But I think it is pretty much well embedded throughout the model, just in general. Cute.

Room 504: Yeah, you're having, support… not support groups… affinity groups aren't really good, study… research shows, unless those affinity groups are not being used as, like, EEO-type things, right? So the affinity group… an affinity group shouldn't exist just to support themselves, right? Just to… just to advance their interests in the organization. Affinity groups should be used as part of the business model. We should be tapping into the disability group on how to tap into customers with disabilities, right? Not saying, hey, here, advocate for yourselves here. You shouldn't have to advocate for yourself. you should… anyway. But, so that's not… we don't want to have that sort of kind of approach to it and so we've embedded it throughout. Tedrake's talked quite a lot… a few times about trying to go off and make sure that any accessibility initiative is tied into the larger mission of the organization, such that if there… that the organization sees the value of accessibility because it is advancing other goals, not… Right, exactly, yeah, that's a good point too, yeah. So, we do have it in there in terms of, like if you're doing, if you're doing usability testing, or you want… you're creating new product, consult your team of… your accessibility, or your disability affinity group, or whatever, say, hey guys, take a look at this, what do you think? Do you think there's any issues, or whatever? Is it usable? And that's… that's not like people disposed advocating for themselves, that's people disposed contributing to the business. Yeah. Right? So yeah, and that part, that much is embedded in the model. Right.

Room 504: We're a little bit over, thank you for the robust conversation, and thank you for the support. We appreciate it, and we're… we welcome everybody to join the task force, or to pop in every now and then, and give us ideas to support the work, create visual aids stuff like that. Yeah, thank you, we really appreciate it.