- Hi, everyone. Great to be here with you today, really excited to go through this workshop and help you think about how to advance accessibility in your companies. Before we get started today, I would love to actually know who we have on the workshop. So, if everyone could just go in the chat and introduce yourself, just your name, where you're calling in from today, I'll let you know I'm calling in from San Francisco, California. And for those of you who I haven't had the pleasure of meeting before, I'm an analyst at Forrester research, where my job is to cover what's happening in the accessibility space. So a typical week for me is interviewing companies all over the world about what they're doing to advance accessibility and then publishing research reports summarizing the findings of that research. And I've been actually working for the last six months or so, on studying how companies go about initiating accessibility in their companies and then advancing their practices. And we just published new research at Forester on this topic yesterday. So you're actually the first ones to see this research as part of this workshop today, and I'm really excited to share it with you. So looking at the chat, it looks like we have people calling in from all over, I saw Athens Greece, Canada, Charleston, South Carolina, Costa Rica, this is amazing. I'm so excited we have folks from all over the world and I think we're gonna have a lot to learn together as part of today's session. So with that, let me tell you what to expect. We actually have two hours together today. I'm gonna start by actually doing a lot of talking to you. I'm going to give you an overview of what we are seeing at Forrester in terms of the digital accessibility landscape. We will then spend quite a bit of time about 45 minutes walking you through our latest research on this topic. We're going to talk about how you can advance your maturity at different stages in your journey to accessibility. Then as Laura mentioned, we're gonna be doing some interactive exercises later in the workshop. We're actually going to break you into rooms and you will share and learn from your peers, then we'll bring everyone back, have kind of a quick large group discussion about how that went, and then we'll wrap up with some suggested next steps, and how you can put into practice what we talk about here together today. So with that, we do have a lot to cover. as Laura mentioned, pop those questions in the chat as they come up, I will pause periodically to answer those. But for now, I'm going to dive in to the first portion of our workshop. I'm going to talk about the digital accessibility landscape. So we're going to cover a few different things here. We're going to cover trends, we're going to talk about some of the key challenges that you all told us prevent you from maybe being able to advance accessibility to the extent that you'd like to. And then we're going to talk about a maturity model. A way of thinking about how you can start to overcome those challenges and make progress towards a mature accessibility program. Now, before I get into some of the trends, I actually wanna start with a little bit of let's call it accessibility trivia. First, I am curious to know from all of you how many websites are still inaccessible in 2021? Laura just popped up a poll. So, I'd like everyone to go ahead and answer that poll. I'll give you a minute to input your guess there. All right. And then we can go ahead and close the poll. All right, so the correct answer is, and this is according to an annual study that WebAIM does called the WebAIM Million. They look at the top 1 million homepages and they scan them for accessibility issues. So the 48% of you who said 97%, you are correct. It's 97.4% of websites have detectable accessibility failures, that's as of April, 2021. That's a little bit of an improvement from 2020. When they ran that study last February, it was 98%, but clearly we can see there's still a lot of work to be done here. Now, my next question for you is this. In that study, what was the most commonly detected issue? Go ahead and input your guess. I have four options for you to pick from there. All right, so as those are coming in, I'm going to reveal the answer. The answer is low contrast text. Not all texts like many of you thought. And I have on this slide here a picture of a little girl with tears streaming down her face, because when I found out that low contrast text was the most common issue, it made me want to cry. I was a designer in my previous life, and low contrast texts, oh my gosh, it's such an easy thing for us all to address. Now, again, clearly what this study shows is there's a lot of work to be done to create a more accessible web. But that's why all of you are here today. So, I'm excited that you're out there in your organizations helping make progress in this area. Well, that's maybe a bit of a sad story about the state of accessibility. In our research at Forrester we are seeing some really encouraging trends that make me hopeful for the future. So I'm gonna go ahead and walk you through a few of those trends, now, there's a few of them, actually. The first trend I'm seeing is that as I mentioned at the beginning, I talked to a lot of companies, and more companies are telling me that they are prioritizing accessibility, because of the customer experience benefits to be gained, not only for compliance focused reasons like here in the U.S., you know, avoiding being the next company to be hit with an accessibility lawsuit. Specifically, let me show you some data from our research. We run a survey every year where we ask companies, what is the primary driver of your organization's accessibility commitment? When we ran this survey in 2019, 36% of companies told us it was fear of a lawsuit or desire to be compliant with accessibility standards. 41% of companies told us it was to create better experiences for our customers. So pretty similar splits there, pretty close. We rerun this survey after the pandemic or towards the end of the pandemic, at the very end of 2020, it was a very different story. We saw the number of companies saying that fear of a lawsuit with their primary driver go down to 24%. And the percentage of companies who said they're driven by a desire to create better CX for all customers go up to 61%. Now, I asked you a modified version of this question and for those of you who took our pre-webinar survey. And I was again, equally encouraged by what you told us when we asked you about the primary driver, 36% of you said your company's focused on accessibility, because it's about reflecting your stated values and commitments, for example, to diversity, equity, and inclusion. 25% of you said to create better experiences for all of your customers. And then 21%, so third place, was motivated by lawsuit, or fear of a lawsuit, or desire to be compliant. So this is what I mean again, by we're seeing an encouraging shift. And the reason why I say that's encouraging just to explain that a bit further is because we find that when companies take a compliance focused approach to accessibility that it tends to lead to some bad practices, specifically, a situation where accessibility is bolted on at the end of the process. A situation where there's a narrow focus on accessibility only in development and testing. And result in experiences that are compliant with the web content accessibility guidelines, but not necessarily great experiences. On the other hand, we find that companies who approach accessibility as a customer experience, or a diversity, equity, and inclusion imperative have good practices in place. They tend to focus on accessibility early in design. They look at accessibility more as a tool for innovation not something they just have to do. And it also results in just better user experiences, not just compliant experiences. Now, second thing that I find encouraging as far as trends. We're finding in companies that in the absence of having a top-down commitment to accessibility employees are still doing the work. The work is still happening in pockets in the organization. You told us this in the pre-webinar survey, 39% of you told us that your organization has grassroots efforts around accessibility. So certain individuals and teams are doing the work to improve the accessibility of your products. 38% of you said you have a top-down commitment and the work is actually happening. And then 16% of you said, you have a top-down commitment but the work's not happening yet. But I'm encouraged by that grassroots number. And what I hope you'll take away from today's workshop, if you're in that 39% with grassroots movements is how to start to make that official business case, so you can get that top-down support, you can get the budget and you can start to scale these practices more broadly. Now, this is a common comment that I heard in our survey that we do at Forrester, we asked that same question. A lot of times we're seeing accessibility efforts happening in the UX or the design area of the company. So for example, one survey respondent told us, "We don't have a top-down mandate, but we're creating some important projects around accessibility in the UX team." So again, very encouraging that the work is starting to be initiated. And again we'll give you some tools to take that further today. But I wanna talk to you about one more trend. So, during the pandemic, during 2020, and we're seeing this continuing into 2021, as well, we saw many consumers turning to digital for the first time to perform certain tasks. And this has had, you know, not many good things have come out of the COVID-19 pandemic, but one good thing is it has shone a spotlight on the importance of digital accessibility. I'm gonna show you some data from a survey that we run. It's a large consumer survey we do every year at Forrester, and we ask consumers, which of the following financial activities have you done for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic? And I was pretty shocked how high these percentages were, to be honest with you. 33% of consumers saying that they used online or mobile bill-pay for the first time. 29% accessing their financial accounts online for the first time. 28% using mobile check deposit for the first time. And we see this in other industry contexts as well. And many organizations that I speak to for my research, they echo that they're seeing this in their data. You know, they're saying things to me, like, digital engagement it's just off the charts. And we have, you know more people with disabilities, aging adults, over 65 population, digital novices, you know, turning to our products for the first time to complete tasks. And again, it's putting this extra emphasis on the importance of ensuring that experiences are accessible for those groups, but also in general it creates an easier and better experience for everyone. So that's the last trend I wanted to share with you. So we talked about a few things just there. We talked about how the drivers for accessibility are changing. We talked about how, even in companies where accessibility doesn't have top-down support the work is still happening. And we talked about how the pandemic really shone a spotlight on the importance of digital accessibility. But while those are encouraging, I acknowledge and I have been there in companies trying to do this work, so I feel it too, that this is not easy. It's not easy to advance accessibility in an organization. And there's a few reasons for that. There is actually several common challenges. So I actually wanna share with you what you all told us are the biggest challenges that you're facing in your organizations. Here's what you told us. We asked you, what challenges do you face creating accessible digital experiences at your company? The number one challenge by far, 69% of you said it's a limited internal awareness of accessibility. We are going to focus a lot on that today, and some strategies that you can use to change that. The other top challenges you told us were accessibility not being a formal requirement on projects. We're gonna talk about that as well. Organizational silos, we'll give you some strategies for how to start to break those down. And then lack of a documented process, 53% of you said that. And you know, many other challenges as well, but those were the top ones that I wanted to highlight. Now, the good news is the rest of today's webinar is all about overcoming these challenges. First, I'm going to talk to you about some strategies I've seen to do that, and then you're going to share your own strategies with each other as well. To help with this, we have developed a basic model for advancing accessibility maturity in your company. And we find that the right strategies to overcome these challenges they're a little bit different depending on where you are on that journey. So what I'd like to here is to show you a model for advancing your maturity, that I hope will prove useful to you as you're working through this in your companies. And I'll give you the overview of the model, and then we'll be diving into each of these steps more deeply. So there's three levels of maturity we're laying out today. The first level is what we're calling initiating. You're in this level, if you are starting that conversation in your organization about the importance of accessibility. If you are working on accessibility, but it's very ad hoc, it's very grassroots, it's not well-documented yet, you are in this initiating level. And I suspect many of you on the call are here based on what I saw in our pre webinar survey, that's level one. Level two is what we're calling establishing. You're in this level if your company is committed to accessibility, it's a stated commitment, maybe that's even mandated but you're really just getting started in terms of putting the necessary practices in place to make it happen. So things like creating your policy, creating your processes, establishing training for employees and forming key partnerships, that's level two, establishing. And then level three is what we call scaling. You're at the scaling level, if you have established practices in place for digital accessibility, and now you're working on scaling those to other areas of the organization, or maybe you're working on accessibility as it relates to customer facing experiences, and now you're working to scale that to employee systems as well. So this level, it's all about how do we scale and how do we continue to up-level and evolve our practice over time. And here I hope today that those of you in that level that you'll take away some inspiration from all of the company examples I'm gonna share with you from some companies that are definitely at that level and in some cases beyond. Now, before we move on I'm gonna ask Laura, to pull up our third and final poll for this section, because I'd love to have all of you tell us which of these levels, based on the descriptions that I just gave you is your company currently sitting at? So are you initiating accessibility, are you establishing your accessibility practices, or are you working to scale you're already established practices in your company? Give you just a minute to complete that. All right. And then we'll go ahead and close this poll and just see where everyone is. All right, so 36% of you are at the initiating level, 50% at establishing, and 15% at scaling, this is great. Later in the webinar, when we get to our exercises, we're actually going to have you talk to others who are at the same level as you. So remember your answer to this question, because we're gonna be having you join specific rooms based on the stage that you're at. So thanks for answering that question, and it's great to know the breakdown that we have in the session today. Now, before we move on to the next section, Laura, I wanted to see if there's one or two questions in the chat so far that we could pause and answer at this point.

- Sounds good, let's take a look here. Someone was wondering what they should do if they feel they're in between, you know levels one and two. Is that a common thing that you see?

- Absolutely, and I should mention that actually. So if you do research on the accessibility maturity models that are out there, many models have quite a few more phases than this. We're simplifying it a bit for the purpose of this webinar. But to that person who asked the question, absolutely, there's different stages really within each of these levels. And, you know, I probably could create a nine level model based on this framework that I just shared with you. So that's absolutely a common situation. The other thing I would like to mention is you might spend years in one of these levels. So for example, establishing, I talk to companies where it takes them a couple of years to do all of the necessary practices that we'll talk about today to get the practice established. Scaling, you'll be in that stage probably forever. You know, all of know the work's never done when it comes to accessibility, Things are always changing, the standards are evolving, technology's evolving, expectations are evolving. So, you know, you'll be sitting in these stages for quite a while, and yes, absolutely, it's possible to be in between. So I think even for those companies, if you feel you're sitting in between these two levels, I would pay attention to specifically the actions for those two levels you're sitting in between, because I think those are gonna be particularly useful to you today.

- Hey Gina, this is Ryan. I did wanna point out one other thing.

- Yeah.

- Folks may think that they're in one level of maturity and we may think that they're in a different one. So I did wanna remind everybody that took a part of the pre-workshop survey that we did make our best guess at which level of maturity that we think you're in based on how you answered those questions. I did post that link to chat just for reminder. It might be good to look at where we think you are and where you think you are.

- Absolutely, thanks Ryan. And it's not a perfect science. So, you know, and actually I was gonna mention, we're gonna now walk through actions to take at each of these levels, but I would definitely encourage you, don't take a nap during the other two levels that you think don't apply to you. Because I think you'll get some tips out of each of the levels we walk through. And then also think about that situation, a year, or a couple of years from now, if you move companies, you might move from an organization that's scaling to an organization that's just getting started, where no one's talking about accessibility, so that initiating level. So I hope to give you some practices to also set you up for that future success as well. Great, so with that, let's go ahead and dive in to what some of these important actions are. We're calling this how to advance accessibility at your organization. Key actions for each stage of maturity. Now, before we get into this, I actually wanna pull up a quote. This quote is from Haben Germa, from her book titled 'Haben' that she released a couple of years ago. And Haben says this, she says, "Inclusion happens when we all take active steps to remove barriers." And I want to focus on the word she said, "When we all take active steps." This work is not easy. So today is all about beginning or continuing to take those active steps even if they're small active steps and bring others with you along the way. So while some of the things we'll talk about, like I said, could take months or years, they're not easy, it begins with taking those active steps. Sometimes it's starting a conversation with someone in your organization, you know, who is going to be an important partner in advancing. So keep that in mind, take those active steps. Now we're going to discuss what those active steps are. We're gonna chart that path to digital accessibility maturity. And I like to just start with a quick overview of what we're gonna cover, just so you know what to expect here. We'll talk about three key actions at each level. For the initiating level, we're going to discuss how to create and sell the business case. How to lay the foundation by building awareness. Remember, 31% of you said that's your biggest challenge, so we're gonna focus a lot on that. And then how to evaluate your existing experiences using free tools. For the establishing level, we're going to discuss how to define your accessibility policy. How to build accessibility into each phase of product development. And how to expand your education and training efforts. Education and training is so important. And then for the scaling level, we're going to talk about how you can start to really ramp up and scale your practices for testing and monitoring across all of your digital experiences. We'll talk about the often overlooked, but critical aspect of incorporating accessibility into procurement. And we'll talk about how if you're not already doing it at this level, the importance of recruiting people with disabilities as partners in your design process and along this journey. So with that, let's start with level one, initiating. If your company falls at this level, you need to focus on three things. creating and selling that business case, laying the foundation for accessibility to take hold by building awareness and evaluating experiences using existing tools, free tools rather. Keep in mind, I'm gonna walk through these one, two, three, but these are not necessarily sequential steps. And actually I would encourage you to be tackling all three of these in parallel, and I'll speak to why that is, as we go through them. All right, so action number one. Create and sell the business case. We could spend a whole two hours talking about this. I think Deque has done whole webinars, for example, on this topic. But we're gonna focus on some of the most important things. In creating a business case, it's an art. It is very much an art, it's all about understanding what's going to work, what's going to resonate based on the specific strategic priorities of your organization. So let's talk about some best practices to apply to create an effective business case. First, some general best practices. You're going to want to elevate the benefits that align to your company's strategic priorities. And I'll walk through some examples of that in a moment on the next slide. You're also going to want to really, really, understand the executives that you need to convince, specifically what are their priorities and their motivations. You're going to want to appeal to both the head and the heart. What I mean by that is the head apply to logic, right? So you're going to want numbers in your business case. You're going to want to be able to talk about the benefits whether that's financial benefits, you know, legal kind of risk mitigation benefits, or other, you're going to want to put numbers behind that. But you also want to appeal to the heart. At the end of the day, it's going to be really hard for anyone to say accessibility is not important, when you can start to appeal to just that desire we all have to do the right thing for humanity, for society, so we'll talk about how you can do that as well. And then finally, while arguments focused on compliance and risk are effective, I wouldn't make that the only lever that you pull as part of your business case, because we don't wanna fall into that trap I mentioned earlier, where you sell your business case completely based on compliance and avoiding legal risk, and then you fall into these traps of accessibilities thought of just this thing that we bolt on at the end, and we remediate and fix issues, that's not the right approach to accessibility as we'll discuss. So keep these four practices in mind. Now, when it comes to aligning to your company's strategic priorities, these are the common priorities that companies I speak with are creating business cases around. There's a lot on this slide, but I'm gonna step through this here. The first is competitive differentiation. If you are in an industry that is very competitive, which quite frankly is probably most industries, but also if you're in an industry where accessibility is just not something that your competitors really have on their radar, yet, there's a huge opportunity here. So here you wanna talk about how accessibility will help your company tap into new markets of customers, including people with disabilities who number, 1 billion globally, their friends and family, and the rapidly growing aging population, that of course is experiencing changing abilities as a result of the aging process. Another common priority that I see organizations aligned to is mitigating risk, particularly here in the U.S. there've been a lot of lawsuits related to digital accessibility. So you can talk about how accessibility helps you avoid legal troubles, not be the next company that's hit with a digital accessibility lawsuit. And there's a study from usable net that lays out kind of the lawsuit analysis for each year, that's a good resource to point to there in your business case. A third strategic priority is improving customer experience. If your company has a chief customer officer, has a kind of formal program around CX, you can talk about how accessibility is important to that, because accessibility helps improve experiences for all customers. You can talk about the curb cut effect, and show examples of products like OXO Good Grips that were created for the founder's wife who had arthritis, but are now products that are loved by everyone, because they solve this key problem which is most kitchen utensils are hard to grip. If your company's focused on cost reduction right now, talk about how focusing on accessibility early in doing it the right way will help you avoid the high cost of remediation later on and the high cost of addressing accessibility complaints and lawsuits. And actually Greg Williams at Deque has a really great blog post, and I know he's done presentations on like the cost of accessibility complaints, really compelling data to pull in there. If one of your strategic priorities is attracting and retaining employees, and fields like design and development, technical roles, talk about how accessibility will help you attract those employees that want to work for companies who care about these things, whose values and actions align with their own. And then lastly, in 2020, we saw many organizations creating formal programs around diversity, equity and inclusion. And those programs often are focused internally on things like hiring practices, but you can partner with that group to say, hey, you know, accessibility is a very important reflection of that commitment. You know, if we're putting inaccessible products in the world, we're not really reflecting the fact that we care about diversity, equity and inclusion. So there's a real business case to be made with aligning with DE and I, as well. Now, there's likely multiple priorities on this list that are important at your company, so most business cases I see, you know, they're looking at several priorities, they're pulling several levers when it comes to building the business case. Let me give you a couple examples of how companies I've interviewed have approached this. First is Humana. So Humana's digital accessibility lead. She sold accessibility at her company by, as she said, using age as the doorway to inclusion. What she meant by that is seniors are an important customer segment to her company being a healthcare firm. And so it made sense to to focus on specifically the aging population as kind of a key lever in her business case. And then she also found that people related to that, because most people have witnessed a friend, or relative, or colleague who's in that over 65 population struggle with an inaccessible product. So that's one example framing a business case around age. Capital One, different approach. Capital One they've had an accessibility program I believe for about a decade now, and they drew connections to their corporate values. So they have corporate values around excellence and doing the right thing. And so they were able to make a case that accessibility is important to living out those values. So those are two examples. I also wanna share with you actually a set of slides that I created and that I use a lot to talk about the business case for accessibility and a lot of the clients I work with have used them effectively as well, in their business cases. So I'd like to share them with you, and I welcome you to use them as well. You'll be getting these materials after the webinar. And the slides are a way to show your executives that accessibility impacts way more people than they think. Let me explain what I mean by that. So this series of slides here, it's centered around, I have an image of a globe on the slide. And I point out that our global population that this globe represents is 7.7 billion people, that's how many people are on the planet Earth. And you can start by talking to your executives about how, you know, the population that most of us assume is impacted by accessibility. Most of us assume it's this little sliver of the population, so I'm highlighting like a very tiny line at the bottom of my globe visual here. That's the assumed population of people with physical and cognitive disabilities. But then you can say to them, but actually it's much bigger than that. So now I'm highlighting about a seventh of my globe and I'm pointing out that there's 1 billion people in the world that live with the permanent disability. So these people are definitely out of your reach as a company, if you're not focusing on accessibility. But then you can take it further from there and point out that we also have 700 million people globally who are over the age of 65 and experiencing changes in visit physical and cognitive abilities, and they also need products that are accessible. So at this point, we now have like about a quarter of our globe filled in as far as who benefits from accessibility. But it doesn't stop there, so you can take it further and then inform, enlighten your executives by saying, and there's 2.4 billion people in the world who are friends and family members of people with disabilities and they want to buy products from companies who focus on accessibility. They're not going to buy from you, if you're excluding their friends and family members from participating in the products that you put out into the world. So at this point over half of our globe is filled. We're already making a compelling case for the key markets that you can tap into by focusing on accessibility. But then you can surprise them by also saying, it's really every single person though that benefits when we prioritize accessibility as a company. So the other 3 billion people in the world have now filled up my entire globe here benefit, because of the curb cut effect. The idea that when you create an accessible product it's a better experience for everyone just like the curb cuts in the sidewalks are really important for people in wheelchairs, but they also help kids on tricycles, people pushing strollers, all of us at different points in our life based on situations that we're in. So that's again, just a visual and a series of slides that you can use as part of your business case to make that point around how many people are truly impacted by accessibility. And we're gonna give you an action plan. You'll receive this next week. That's going to include links to a lot of other resources and studies that you can pull into your business case, and know that that's coming soon for you. Now, the second action to take in addition to creating your business case is to start laying that foundation by building awareness of accessibility. And this is where it's really important to consider your audience. And there's kind of two key audiences here that we need to think about. One is executives. We just talked a little bit about them, you know, with them you wanna focus on the business case, the business risk, also the upside of prioritizing accessibility. When it comes to employees, the teams that are actually doing the work creating these experiences, with them you wanna focus on driving home the why. So who does accessibility help? How do people with different abilities use digital experiences? And just open their eyes to things that they didn't know about. You know, they were probably unintentionally excluding people without even realizing it. So you wanna open their eyes to these points. So one example of a company I spoke with that did this is Salesforce. So Salesforce's director of accessibility, Jessie Housler, he talked to me about how in making, when he describes accessibility in employees, he says that, "In making one of their flagship products accessible to service agents with disabilities, it helps the company increase employment opportunities for one of the largest communities of unemployed people." So, you know, really tying into employee's desires for a sense of purpose in their work, and talk about like a really important impact that you can have, you know, opening up doors for employment. So that's one example of what I mean by driving home the why. Now, getting really tactical here, a good approach to raising awareness is to create what I like to call an accessibility essentials roadshow. A one-hour presentation, and it can start really informal. You know, invite some colleagues to a lunch and learn. And in this presentation, cover topics like, why is accessibility important to our company? You know, pulling some of those points from your business case to make those connections. I'd also suggest including video clips of people with disabilities using and commenting on your products, so that people can really start to understand how assisted technologies work. And some of the impacts of not focusing on accessibility. Also include examples of accessible and inaccessible experiences ideally from your company, so people can start to see what good and bad looks like, and recognize that. Talk about things that employees can start doing right now to improve accessibility. Maybe give them a checklist of three things to do, you know, when they're coding experiences, or designing, or writing content, or whatever the case may be. And then share stories of customers and employees who have been shut out. So bringing forward, maybe some feedback that you've received, some quotes to help really make it real for employees. Adobe offers a nice approach to as far as how to raise awareness. So when I talked to Matt Mae who we use inclusive design there, he me that they really motivated their design community at Adobe by inviting customers with disabilities to actually share their stories firsthand, at the company's worldwide design summit. So these customers discussed challenges that they have with Adobe products, but then also challenges with just daily life things like, you know joining web conference tools or finding a job. This is also a great place as far as raising awareness to do things like embedding, just reminders in your environment make accessibility top of mind. I'm showing a poster here from the UK Home Office. These are open source, you can download them. They have posters that say, "Designing for users with low vision and a column of do's such as use, good color contrast, and then right next to that a column of don'ts, like don't use low color contrast in small font sizes. So in a remote world, I know you probably can't put up posters in your office, but maybe you could put this as your computer background. So on your next conference call, people are seeing that reminder of accessibility, and it's starting healthy conversations and sparking questions for them. And speaking of questions, my last tip here is you can make a lot of progress by being that person who starts to ask the tough questions. So for example, if you're a designer and maybe you have a regular design critique with your team next time you're on one of those critiques ask questions, like, have you thought about what this design will sound like when read by a screen reader? Or is this type large enough for an older adult to read? If not, will it scale correctly? Or will that term you're using be understood by a non-native English speaker? So asking these questions can open conversations that weren't happening before and that's a really good way to start raising awareness.

- And then finally, again, your action plan will include links to more free resources you can use when creating your accessibility essentials education at your organization. And then finally, the last action, if you are at that initiating level, level one of your journey is to start getting a sense of where your current experiences stand. And there's a lot of free tools out there that you can use to do that. A good approach here is not to try to evaluate every page of every product that you're, you know, every website your company makes, that's going to be a really difficult task to do at this point in your journey. So I would bring a UX mindset to it. Focus on the top tasks for an important product. There's a really nice methodology called top tasks analysis by a guy named Jerry McGovern, really good book, if you're not sure what those top tasks are. But the idea here is select a few really tasks, things that customers have to be able to do with your website or app that are also important to the business, so that your executives will care as well, when you go to them and say, "Hey, we have a showstopper issue in our paying a bill task, or whatever the case may be. Use free tools to scan pages critical to that task that you selected, and then pull out some example issues, put that in your business case, put it in your accessibility essentials awareness training, So you can start to show some of those big issues that need to be overcome, barriers that you're putting up today that could be preventing your customers from doing what they need to do with your company. And then maybe do that for your competitors too. I've talked to companies who made a compelling business case by saying, look, you know, none of our competitors are doing this, we need to be the first ones on this. I've also seen people make a business case by saying, all of our competitors are doing this and we're not, we're behind the curve. So there's different ways that you can create that story, but it's good to know what your competitors are doing too. Here's an example of a couple of free tools you can use to do those scans. The first is Deque has a tool, Axe DevTools. It's a browser extension for Chrome. I downloaded it the other day and ran it on the San Francisco Chronicle homepage and found 209 issues. And it was really easy, because it's built right there into the browser. Another tool I love is the CCA color contrast analyzer tool. It's got a color picker. I used it the other day to test some things on the New York times cooking homepage that I thought was problematic and was able to identify some contrast issues. So I talked to a lot of designers who like tools like this. And then there's so many other free tools out there, tools like Wave by WebAIM, Google Lighthouse, if you're using design tools I would check out the plug-in called stark, it'll help you test for contrast issues. Contrast for MacOS, and then the Color Oracle colorblindness simulator. And that's just a few, we'll send you links to more of them in the action plan that you'll receive after the webinar. So to summarize, if you're at the initiating level, you're going to focus on creating and selling the business case. Laying the foundation by building awareness. And evaluating experiences using free tools. All right, so, I'm gonna go ahead and move on to the next level. If you have questions about initiating, again, please, capture those in the chat, if we don't get to them all today, happy to follow up with answers afterwards. But for now in the interest of time, I am gonna move straight into our next level. So this levels for you, if you are working to establish your practices. We're going to talk about defining your policy, building accessibility into each phase of design, and development, and expanding that education we just spoke about to also include things like role-based training. So let's start with defining your accessibility policy. Now, in our pre-webinar survey, 40% of you said that you are working on this in 2021. So listen up this section is for you. And this is very important, because your policy really kind of acts as a compass or a North star. It's a commitment, it helps you articulate where are we going, and how are we going to get there? So let's talk about a few key elements of an accessibility policy. And by the way, don't try to create this by yourself. This is actually a perfect action to partner with your business partners, the people who actually are responsible for the products that need to evolve, and then also your legal partners, as well. They're definitely going to have inputs as far as what we're committing to as an organization, because there are, you know compliance and legal impacts here. So as you're having conversations with those collaborators, talk about, what standards are we committed to meeting as an organization. For most companies that's meeting the web content accessibility guidelines at level AA. You're gonna want to talk about what does it mean to create an accessible experience for our company? So there, you're going to want to capture things like, are we talking about, you know, our customer facing products here? Are we talking about every single digital technology, including everything used by our employees? You know, spelling that out in your policy is important too. What digital experiences are covered? I just started to allude to that. And then what is your plan to get there? So what are your priorities? You know, what are you going to focus on in the short term? What are some target dates in terms of getting different experiences to that goal that you defined? And then who are the responsible parties that are going to make it happen? Both within your organization, but then, where do you need to seek external support from like an accessibility partner as well? Now, we also many companies I speak with, after creating their policy, they also create kind of an external statement that they can put on their website to summarize their goals and intent. This would include maybe summary points from your policy, you know, what your commitment is and what you're actively doing to meet it, and then providing a path for your customers to provide feedback on your experiences and creating as part of your policy, those internal practices for how you will actually address and act on that feedback. And if you're looking for a good example, Capital One's accessibility statement on their homepage, it's a really good model to follow. The top of it says, accessibility for all. They have a way for customers to chat with them about accessibility issues, they also have a path customers to call, and then they have a stated kind of summary of their commitment as well. So that's creating your accessibility policy. The second action that's important to take is to start having conversations with your partners at each phase of the software development life cycle to discuss how are we going to build accessibility into each phase of our company's flavor of agile or waterfall, or whatever software development methodology you're following. And this is a really important one. We're going to pause here for a few minutes. I wanna share with you a quote from one of the people that I interviewed for my recent research. I interviewed Mark Penncook, he leads accessibility at Capital One, and he said to me, "You need to create an engine that builds things to be accessible to the standard every time." Mark pretty much sums up the importance of what we're trying to do with this action. You wanna make sure that accessibility is something that's repeatable and that, you know, can be executed again, and again, and again. So here's how to do this. And by the way, first, before I get into that, when we asked you about what your company is doing in regards to this in our survey, only 22% of you said that you are integrating accessibility into each stage of product design and development. So, you know, for everyone else outside of that 22% these next few slides I hope will really help you. First, take advantage of open source resources. You do not have to reinvent the wheel here. A lot of companies have published externally their processes for accessibility. One of my favorite resources is IBM's Equal Access toolkit. If you Google it, you'll find it right away. They published this last year on global accessibility awareness day, and it walks you through the specific steps you need to take during planning, design, development, verify and launch, kind of every stage of the process. So I would look at examples like this as a starting point, although of course, you're going to want to adapt them to your specific company's way of working. Another example I'll share here is this comes from Aetna. So Aetna, you know, defined how they would build accessibility into their agile process. So for example, during sprint zero, they added a step where accessibility is included as a formal requirement. They then have a staff where there's an early review of prototypes for accessibility. They have a step for early manual and automated review of their code base. And then later a thorough review of their working code. They also have a step where they include participants with disabilities, and their usability tests to make sure that they don't have any issues from that perspective. And then a review once the product's in production. So I would think about creating something like this for your organization. What are those key steps that we're going to commit to doing on every project along the way? As part of this, it's really important to make sure that your, the term often used in the industry I know is shifting left, right? Making sure accessibility is not just a focus in the later stages, but accessibility is a focus from the beginning and it really starts in design. So here, I would make sure that, you know, work with your teams who are creating your design principles, your design systems, to make sure that the principles of inclusive design are woven into those processes. That you have a methodology in place for including people with disabilities in your design research. And that your design teams that are creating mark-ups and assets have templates for annotating their designs with accessibility guidance for developers. Things like here should be the heading structure on this page. And a good resource I'll point you to here is Microsoft. Microsoft's inclusive design toolkit. I have a screenshot from it here, where they talk about three principles of inclusive design. It's about recognizing exclusion. It's about solving for one extending to many, and learning from diversity. But you can download their toolkit, and there's a lot of great resources in there for you. So here's a couple of examples of companies that I think have done this successfully in terms of building accessibility into design, so really shifting left. The first is U.S. Bank, U.S. Bank has 29 UX accessibility consultants, they call them, that work with U.S. Bank's I think they have hundreds of people at this point in their design organization. So they work with those people that are working to support their agile teams to help them integrate accessibility best practices as early as possible. Another company doing this is the design agency Blink. So they recently did a project with NASA where they partnered on a new website design. And one best practice they did is they included people with disabilities from the start in early discovery research, so that they could use that to inform the requirements for the website itself, and that led to important insights for them, like the need to simplify navigation menus and create intuitive keyboard navigation paths. One more best practice as you're integrating accessibility into each phase is to find the people that are working on your design system. Building accessibility into your design system is one of the smartest things that you can do right now to make sure that accessibility is going to be built in to some extent by default in your experiences. So you'll wanna reflect accessibility in all aspects of your design system from your principles to your reusable component libraries, foundational elements, like your color palette and typography guidelines, and then guidelines as well, things like, you know, content guidance, how do we write in an inclusive way? There's a lot of design systems out there that are good inspiration for this. I have a screenshot here of VMware's clarity design system. They focused on accessibility when standing up their design system. All of their components meet the accessibility guidelines, so that's a good example to look at. But there's many more as well. Zendesk Garden design system, Adobe spectrum, Google material, Westpac, the Australian kind of banking group, their design system gel, these are all fantastic examples, all publicly available for you to look at. And there's many more examples at designsystemsrepo.com. And we'll include that link in your action plan, you don't have to write that down. All right, so yeah, your action plan will include many more resources like that. So then the final action I wanna touch on as part of establishing this phase is you're gonna expand on that education that you started when you were initiating. Let's talk about a couple of specific things to do here. The first is at this stage in your journey you'll want to stand up role-based training that participants can apply immediately. So here you're really training to the web content accessibility guidelines, helping designers, developers, testers, content authors know their exact responsibilities as it pertains to creating accessible experiences. So giving them the techniques to meet the different guidelines, and also teaching them how to test their work. This is a step where I often see companies partnering with accessibility firms who offer this role-based training, so that, you know you have experts kind of come in and lead this training or get licenses to like a virtual training platform, or something along those lines. Now, one company whose approach I really loved here, because they did the role-based training, but then they put it into action immediately is Fidelity. So when I spoke to Fidelity, they shared that they brought 600 people together, designers and developers from their workplace investing business, and they held what they called an accessibility Fest. It was a two day event, where day one focused on understanding the opportunities and benefits of accessibility. They had talks from executives, clients, and others, so it was all about kind of awareness building. And then day two, got into the nitty-gritty of implementation. So they had teams work together to audit their products. They actually fixed some of the problems right there on the spot, and then they documented problems. And they said they documented over 700 issues that they immediately put into the backlog for future remediation. So I thought that was a kind of a cool approach to get people going with accessibility. And then here, you know as part of that role-based training also create some simple job aids that people can take back with them to help in applying the training role-based checklist work really well here. I'm showing an example of a checklist for a UX designer, you know, where you're reminding them to check their color contrast, position related elements next to each other, create simple layouts, et cetera. And then my final tip for you when it comes to expanding your education and training is to make sure that you're instilling an accessibility mindset during employee onboarding, because you can do a great job with your role-based training, but you probably have new designers, and testers, and developers, joining your company every week. So how are you gonna make sure that they also are getting this education right when they walk in the door? 'Cause that's what you want. So set them up for success. And I'm gonna give you a couple examples of how I've seen companies do this. The first example comes from Wells Fargo Advisors. The accessibility team there, they send a welcome email to any new designer, for example, that joins the company. The welcome email includes videos from recent usability test sessions. So for example, they include a video of a customer navigating the site with a screen reader. And then they include a lot of links in that email to internal resources on accessibility. It's also a great way just to introduce new employees to you, the people who are the accessibility experts maybe in the company, or are leading that work, so they know who to go to with questions. Another company that I thought offered a good model here is eBay. So eBay's accessibility team, they run a segment on why accessibility is important to the company and they do that as part of their new hire training. And then they also have modules within the company's required compliance training. And I would say that is a really good goal to work towards, to get to a place where your company views accessibility as so important that it's just like compliance, it's just like privacy and security, And it's an important part of that new hire onboarding or training as those topics are. So here to summarize, if you're at the establishing level you're going to want to define your accessibility policy, build accessibility into each phase of product design and development and then expand education with role-based training and integration into new-hire onboarding. All right, we have one final level that we're going to walk through and then we're going to do something a little more interactive, and you can stop listening to me for a bit. So this third level we're going to walk through, again, this is if your company has established your practices, but now you're working to scale them, up-level them, evolve them, to kind of keep pace as your organization evolves, as you add more products, et cetera. So let's go ahead and get into our three practices for scaling. We're gonna talk about ramping up practices for testing and monitoring. We're going to talk about incorporating accessibility into procurement. And we're going to talk about recruiting people with disabilities as partners in your design process. So action number one, for scaling organizations. To this point, you've probably, I would suspect based on companies I speak with, relied a lot on free tools for testing your experiences. You've probably done a lot of kind of ad hoc reporting of the state of accessibility on different products, but at this stage of your journey, this is where I see companies often and investing in solutions for really scaling those practices, and having ways to kind of report out on an organizational level how are we doing in terms of meeting our accessibility objectives? So a few tips to keep in mind here. First, is make sure that you know and that you take a comprehensive approach to accessibility testing. I'm going to simplify this a little bit here, but when I speak with companies I'm finding it really boils down to three types of testing that are critical to have in place. One is automated testing. And this is one area where, you know, kind of the enterprise testing solutions that are out there can be really helpful in terms of just continuously scanning, running those automated checks on your experiences to detect accessibility violations that need to be addressed and fixed. But I'm sure most of you on this call know automation, you know, you can't automate everything when it comes to accessibility, you certainly cannot. So the second type of testing that's important is manual testing. So training your testers to evaluate the things that cannot be automated, for example, you know, is the all text for your images actually good and equivalent in meaning. And then the third type of testing which I don't see enough companies doing this quite frankly, but I think it should be viewed as important as automated and manual testing is usability testing. So actually conduct usability testing with people with disabilities to make sure that your experience is not compliant, which should be addressed with the other two types of testing, but that you're actually creating an easy and emotionally positive enjoyable experience for people with disabilities. So conducting usability testing is key too. Now, as I alluded to these first two types of testing, automated and manual, this is where enterprise accessibility testing platforms can be really helpful. Most of these platforms offer, you know, kind of guided remediation, helping your developers and testers know what to look for and then actually how to fix the issues that they find, So you typically see companies exploring these products at this stage in the journey. Part of What to think about when creating your approach around testing as well is are you catching issues as far upstream as possible? What I mean by that is designers should always be testing their designs for color contrast, for no use of color alone, for clear link names. Developers shouldn't have to find those issues, so teach your designers how to use contrast checker tools. How to run their designs through different colorblindness filters to make sure that they're not excluding customers. And then same with development, it shouldn't get to testing before you find out that you're missing, you know all tags or you you're missing, you know, level one header for your page. So helping your developers understand how to run their code through an accessibility checker. I'm showing an example here, from the product from Microsoft that I believe they worked on with Deque called accessibility insights, to help developers, guide them through the process of identifying resolving issues before checking in their code. So, think about how you're catching those issues upstream, that's important. One company that I'll use as an example here, who really went pretty far in terms of investing in processes to help with this contesting and monitoring of the bank's experiences was U.S. Bank. And they actually gave a presentation about this at Deque's conference. So if you're interested in it, I would go check it out. But in short, a couple of years into their journey they rolled out Deque's automated testing tools. They now have 190 product teams using those tools and it really helped them scale accessibility. They saw like a 67% reduction in defects, so again, you know, when you get to that point in your journey, it's worth looking into how software can help you really start to scale your testing practices. All right, so that's testing and monitoring. The second important action at this stage, and I would actually say, you could start this much earlier as well, when establishing your practices. But at this point if you don't have it in place yet, you definitely need to be having conversations with your business partners and your procurement team about how can we build accessibility into our processes for selecting vendors, for renewing contracts with existing vendors, because you can have all the best processes in place internally around accessibility, but if you're buying technologies that aren't accessible, because those vendors just don't know what they're doing, they haven't thought about this, that's going to kind of quickly derail your program. So have those conversations about procurement. And here's a couple things that companies tell me they're doing here. One is simply building accessibility into contracts, and that's both new contracts and then also renewals with existing vendors, as well. As part of that you're gonna wanna speak to what level of conformance you will hold vendors accountable to. Is it, you know, Wikag two dot double O level AA, or whatever it is for you. You're going to want to say that you're entitled to verify conformance, and you know, I'm not a lawyer you'll work with your legal team as far as what the right language is for you and your company. And then you're also going to want to talk about what remedies your company will require, if the delivered solution doesn't meet those requirements. A second place to insert accessibility is when it comes to like RFP processes. For example, most companies have like a vendor questionnaire. And companies told me that they are building accessibility into those questionnaires. So for example, you know, creating questions like what kinds of accessibility testing have you done on your product? Asking the vendor to respond to that. Asking how is accessibility reflected in your product roadmap? Is this a priority for you going forward? And then even asking, how are you including people with disabilities in the development of your product? I would imagine a lot of vendors aren't doing that yet, but they should be. So, you know, starting to encourage them to think about that is really important. And then several companies told me that they actually asked potential vendors to demo their products with a screen reader to see if they really know what they're talking about when it comes to accessibility. So you can decide if something like that is appropriate in your case. One organization I interviewed that is doing this quite well, I think they thought a lot about it was Capital One. The accessibility team there, they're often engaged by their procurement team to test vendor's products. They use manual testing and screen readers to do that. And then the team will actually report the results back to the vendor, in some cases, they'll speak with the vendors engineering team to help them understand how to prioritize accessibility in their products. They're also kind of educating the vendors as part of this process. All right, so building accessibility in procurement. Our final action, we're going to talk about, and I wanna emphasize, if you can do this from day one, from initiating, you know, you absolutely should be, but I often find in many companies that it's a little later in the journey where they put formal practices in place around this. So this is why I'm talking about it in scaling. But the point is you need to have practices in place for recruiting people with disabilities as your partners in the design process. Now, ideally you'll have people with disabilities in your team itself who are there and can help kind of spot and stop issues for making it into your products. But there are some other strategies that we'll talk about too, as far as how to do this. But first I'm again gonna start with a quote here. One of my favorite books actually on this topic is from Kat Holmes. Kat led the inclusive design practice at Microsoft years ago, she's worked at Google as well, and now she's working on inclusive design at Salesforce, and she wrote a book called 'Mismatch'. And in that book, she says, "Inclusion has to involve people who have experienced exclusion." So this is just underscoring the point. You have to have people with disabilities involved in your processes. So a couple thoughts on how companies are doing this. Oftentimes companies are starting by expanding who they recruit for design research. For example, usability test on early concepts of your products. So what I would think about here is, you know, when you're creating recruiting screeners, make ability a key trait that you're intentionally recruiting a range of both physical and cognitive abilities. Maybe consider tapping into your employee base. A lot of organizations work with employee resource groups for people with disabilities, invite employees from those groups to participate in design sprints, or co-creation sessions, or research sessions. Also, I've talked to many organizations that partner with communities, you know, organizations in their communities, the local organization for the blind in your particular city, or state, or region, for example. And then there's companies out there that are actually really helpful partners here. So Knowbility here in the U.S. they're based out of Austin, they have a panel called access works, and it's a panel people with disabilities who are eager and excited to give feedback on company's products. So partnering with them is something I see often. And then in Canada, there's a company called Fable Tech, I believe they're called. And they have a online research platform, also with panelists with disabilities that companies can partner with for user research but even, you know, engineers can get on the phone with someone who uses a certain assistive technology and get feedback on the product. So, you know, I would consider looking into those as well. So one, just specific example from my research that I thought I would share with you. I interviewed a large Italian bank, Intesa Sanpaulo, and they shared that they formed partnerships with nonprofit organizations in Italy, such as the Italian Union for the Blind and Partially Sighted. And they engage members of these groups on a regular basis. They engage them early in their projects to provide feedback on current experiences and help them understand how to improve. And then they also run workshops with members of these organizations, where they present the firm's strategy related to the evolution of our mobile app, for example, and get suggested improvements and really use these organizations as their co-partners in creating the strategy, which I thought was a really good approach. So to summarize what we just spoke about there. If you are in the scaling level of maturity, you're gonna focus on ramping up your practices for testing, monitoring, measuring success as well. You're going to focus on incorporating accessibility into procurement process, and you're going to recruit people with disabilities as partners in your design process. All right, so I just spoke a lot there and I have probably inundated you with information. But I hope that information has been helpful, because what we're going to do now is actually start reflecting on and sharing with each other how we can put some of these techniques into practice in your organizations. So let me first, I'm gonna have you do a quick exercise, and then we'll explain how the breakouts and all of that is going to work in just a few minutes. But first, I would actually like to have each of you do a individual exercise. So go ahead and pull out a piece of paper, or open your favorite note taking application on your computer. And I'm going to give you three minutes, and what I would like you to do in these three minutes is to jot down three ideas that you've taken away from this session so far. Ideas for how you might advance accessibility when you go back, not go back, but when you leave this webinar and go back to conversations and meetings at your company later this week. And an idea could be as simple as capturing a meeting or a conversation that you're going to set up. All right, so I'm gonna stop talking now, I'll give you three minutes and then I'll pull us back together to move on to the next step. Okay, I'm going to pull us back together now, and if you couldn't come up with three ideas, that's okay, hopefully I gave you a little bit of time to reflect, though. I was reading through the chat while you all were doing that, and I love hearing all of your ideas and what's resonating. So I look forward to actually reading through that more later, you all had some good resources and ideas as well. So that being said, we're gonna actually start sharing some of those ideas with one another. So I'm really excited for this. So let me explain how this next section is going to work. What we're going to do is we're going to break into small groups. This will be using the Zoom breakout functions. and I'll give the instructions for the breakout function in a moment. But first I want to explain, when you get into your group what is going to happen. So when you arrive in your room, you know, it would probably take everyone a minute to get in there, but you should quickly have some folks showing up there with you. Your first task is to pick someone to go first. And if someone's eager, just go first, that's great, but if not, you know, what I would suggest, I know a lot of us acquired new pets during the pandemic, so maybe everyone just shares how many pets that they acquired, and whoever has the most pets goes first. So just a suggestion there. Once you figure out who goes first, then that person will start. Everyone is going to take one minute to share an idea that they jotted down. And after you share your idea, I'm going to ask that you pick the next person to go in your group. So that's how we'll do it. And we'll just go around and hopefully everyone will have a chance to share. If we run out of time pop your ideas in the chat. We're actually gonna be sending all the ideas out after the webinar. But we'll do our best to get through everybody in the rooms. If you're not sure what to share, if you're thinking I don't really know, I don't know what idea would be useful for everyone to hear, I'll suggest that maybe you use one of these, I call them statements starters. It's some fill in the blanks, if you kind of remember those. So maybe, you know, you fill in the blank and say, you know, I need to talk to blank about blank. Something, you know conversation you're going to have next week. Or maybe you say I'm going to create blank. Or I will partner with blank to blank. So feel free to use one of those statements, if it's useful or just share your ideal however, you'd like, that's fine as well. So those are our instructions. You will see these in your breakout room. You don't have to remember these you'll see them in there when you join the room. Don't worry about that. So I hope everyone had a great discussion. I know it probably would have been wonderful, if that had been even longer, but I floated around in several groups and there was some great discussion happening, so I hope that was valuable to you. I would love to ask everyone to do one thing. If you could please go into the chat area and just put in one idea that you took away from your small group discussion. It could be an idea that one of the other participants shared that you thought was really cool, and you might think about doing that as well. Or maybe share one of your ideas that you had jotted down during the individual reflection. But I'd love to just hear some of those, since I couldn't be in every breakout. One thing I'll share, one of the breakouts I was in Veronica shared that she just had this idea of setting up an idea board. So after teaching people about accessibility, creating an idea board where people could come and put their ideas on the board about how they can advance accessibility at their companies. So almost like kind of a crowdsourcing, you know, benefit from the ideas of all the different employees. I thought that was really, really neat. So I see some other ideas coming in here. Role-based checklists for new employees. Ooh, I love this one from Sarah, a cool idea about sharing simple slack tips for everyone. So if your company uses slack, that seems like amazing idea, I love that. My company uses Microsoft Teams channels, but I think that could be something to implement there as well. Yeah, a lot of comments about how just starting this journey is itself an accomplishment. I heard that in one of the breakouts I was in, that it can feel a little lonely sometimes leading this work in companies. But the fact that you're even starting, what I often see is you'll start to bring those, you know, evangelists, you'll start to find them, and you know, be able to empower them as you go on this journey. So it's about finding those partners and then they can play a huge role in spreading the word for you. A couple of ideas here around partnering with employee resource groups, pushing for vendor selection for internal tools. Absolutely, even just like your internal meeting software, you know, is that accessible. I've had a lot of accessibility teams tell me they got more involved in those conversations in 2020 than they ever had before. Great, these are wonderful ideas. We are actually as part of the action plans we'll send you next week. My colleague and I at Forrester, we're going to actually go through this chat transcript and pull out some of the themes, in terms of the ideas you identify and we'll send those to you. 'Cause we wanna make sure that you have those notes on all of the ideas that we were able to generate during the session today. So if I could, I'm just gonna share my slides one more time, 'cause I have a few final thoughts I wanted to leave you with. Okay, I'm gonna trust that you're all seeing this again. All right, so we've done a lot today, I shared a lot of information with you, you had some great discussions, what is going to happen next? So on Monday you will receive your action plan. You're actually going to receive three action plans, one for each level. So you'll receive the one for the level that you're currently at, but the other levels as well. This is going to recap the key actions to focus on at that level of maturity. We will include links to resources that you can use to further your learning related to those action topics. We'll also include links to some additional Forrester research. I have a blog on the Forester website where I write about accessibility a lot. So we'll include links to some of those blog posts for you. And then we will also, as I mentioned, include a summary of the ideas that were shared during the small groups, and that you all just shared with us in the chat. And then I also wanted to remind everyone, though, I imagine many of you are aware, that global accessibility awareness day is happening next week, Thursday, I believe May, 20th. And so we really hope that the information we shared with you today will be useful to you in terms of your own company's global accessibility awareness day activities. And if you don't have any activity plans, maybe plan something, or maybe even think about sending out an email with some ideas or links to some of the resources that we talked about today. Here's a few specific ideas of things you could do. Number one, maybe you gather some of your colleagues together and watch a recording of today's webinar or discuss the action plans which we're going to send to you on Monday. So you'll have them in plenty of time before global accessibility awareness day. Another idea would be, just incorporating some of today's points into your planned events, if you have an event on the calendar. Another idea I have for you is to commit to having one conversation on global accessibility awareness day with one colleague who is new to accessibility, maybe you send them an invite for a 30 minute chat about accessibility and teach them a few things. Just the conversation going is one a great way to start progressing. You could maybe also send out an email with some of the key facts about accessibility that you've learned today and that you'll find in your action plans. And then lastly, if you're already on your accessibility journey, this is a really good day to celebrate some of those recent accessibility wins. Maybe you send around comments from customers, commenting on, you know, how great your experiences are after implementing accessibility improvements. Or maybe you highlight a specific feature that a product team worked on that was designed and developed with accessibility in mind. So celebrating those wins can be a great way to get some momentum for this topic internally and also spotlight those teams that are doing the hard work to help here. So that is, yeah, the last thing I wanted to remind you of, we do have eight minutes left, Laura, I'm happy to take a question or two, if there's questions we didn't get to, or if you have any, you or Ryan has any final words to wrap up, we can go onto that as well.

- Yep, absolutely Gina, fantastic job. I really appreciate all of the thought and care that you've brought into this presentation. And from what I've seen so far from the action plans, I know everyone's gonna love them. I'm really excited to see those. There are a couple of questions that came up earlier in chat that I can help draw your attention to. And I think maybe they come up in a couple of breakouts I was listening in on. One common question I heard was how would you recommend advancing accessibility when there are many business units or silos at different stages of maturity within an organization?

- Mm, it's a great question. Well, my first tip if you're really just getting started is to pick one area of your organization to pilot this with, and I'll give you an example of why I say that. We talked a lot about how to integrate accessibility into your design process, your testing, et cetera. You're not gonna necessarily get that right on the first try, like with anything else, this is about testing and learning. So you may put some practices in place and find that they're not quite working as well as you wanted, and so you'll want to iterate on those before you start to scale them more broadly. So I typically recommend that organizations start with an area where you have a executive who gets it, you know, they understand why this is important, they're supportive of it. They will work with you to make sure accessibility is a formal requirement for that product or that business, that they're responsible for, and use that as your test case to put those practices in place, try them out, iterate on them and improve, and then you can work to scale out to other areas. Another benefit of that is you will have a nice case study, a nice success story under your belt that you can share with those different areas of the organization who aren't very far along. And one thing we didn't talk about today, Ryan, in depth is it's really important to have a plan for how you'll measure whether your efforts were successful. For some companies it's even just, you know, looking at customer experience and user experience metrics, you know, have those improved as a result of doing this work, and build that into your case study as well. Because that's a really effective way to convince people actually is to have some actual numbers. You know, we built accessibility into our mobile app redesign and here's some benefits that we saw from that.

- Thank you so much, I think we've got time for one more here. And this person's asking explicitly about getting resources. So I think a lot of people from the survey results and in conversations I heard, they're able to get a thumbs up from executive leadership saying, yes, this is a good idea, but then where do the resources come from? How do you make an argument to get those?

- Yeah, absolutely. So one very common approach I've seen here, and we talked about that accessibility policy, right? So you've agreed on what you're committing to, what products are covered, and you know, a plan for how you're going to get there. You know, we hope by December of next year, you know, we'll be here. A really effective way to make the case for resources is to create kind of a few models for your leaders. You know, the first one being, if we keep operating how we are right now with no dedicated resources for accessibility and no budget, it will, we project that it will take us X number of months or years to get to our goal. If we have XYZ dedicated resources, if you give us a budget to hire a company to help us with training and auditing our experiences we will get to that goal this much faster. And this is where if you have a partner in your finance organization who can help you actually build out those models and actually tie some kind of dollars to, you know, those different scenarios that can be really useful. But that's a very common approach. I see, it's gonna take us a long time to get to that goal that you've all committed to, if you don't give us resources and we've actually looked at the cost, you know, here's how much we're asking for in budget, but here's how much more quickly we'll get to that goal. And you know, some of the kind of negative ramifications that we'll be able to avoid, because we're moving on this quickly. So that's one approach. And then definitely as I just mentioned, having those success stories and sharing those broadly and loudly, because if you can, you know, if you can prove definitively that when we incorporate accessibility it leads to better outcomes for the business, for customers and for employees, it's a lot easier to make the case for an accessibility team, or you know, more head count or things along those lines.

- Thanks so much, Gina. Thanks everybody for attending, you've been great, appreciate that the lively participation in the breakouts. If there's anything that Deque can help you with to help advance the state of your accessibility efforts, regardless of where you were on the spectrum today, please, don't hesitate to reach out. We hope you have a great rest of your day.