I stumbled upon W3C Accessibility Maturity Model – Draft Community Group Report (opens in new window) and in this post I’ll try to share some related thoughts of mine.
Where we are, where we want to be and how to get there
Universal questions that make sense for almost everything – to be able to improve we first need to check where we are and what is our destination. Accessibility is no exception. Organizations that are only starting with accessibility efforts should first answer the first question – where we are?
Where we are – current accessibility maturity
Proper accessibility audit of products that also produces backlog with accessibility (and usability) bugs and errors, coupled with user impact, effort needed and other helpers to decide about prioritization should be the first step. WCAG must be the baseline and most commonly we should use latest working version of WCAG on level AA, ideally also on level AAA (at least in parts of it).
I believe that such an audit will reveal much more than bugs, especially if audit will not be only limited to web and mobile but also on other digital surfaces like our emails, internal tools, documents and so on. We are not interested only in conformance testing but have to think about holistic situation of organization’s accessibility efforts and document them for further analysis.
W3C’s draft mentions 4 dimensional maturity stages that can help with grading;
- Inactive stage – when there is no awareness or even no recognition of need,
- Launch stage – when organization recognized the need and initiated planning but activities are not well organized,
- Integrate stage – overall approach defined and well organized, roadmap in place,
- Optimize stage – assessment outcomes being fixed and things are consistently evaluated so that we have full overall insights
I can only agree with these, are to the point and allow progressing from lowest to highest. Am only afraid that there are some organizations that can also be found between 1 and 2. Organizations that are aware but are willingly taking inaccessibility as a minor risk. I’ve seen them in practice and I think that some accessibility overlay providers may also contribute to this dangerous stage, promising simple automatic fixes that can not be real.
There are unfortunately some organizations out there that can be defined between inactive and launch stages and are willingly accepting the risks of inaccessible products and services or maybe just buying an overlay that promised them automatic accessibility fixes.
my reflection about maturity stages, based on empirical observations.
I’m not saying that this stage should be added to the model, but to be honest there are some organizations out there that can be defined as in being there in between. Some countries try to fight against it with legislation, but due to the nature of very manual evaluations and limited resources some organizations choose to accept is as totally acceptable risk.
Where we want to be – conformance and beyond
If we are referring to a start up, in the early phase of product development, it’s totally clear – “shift left”, make accessibility a part of research, design, development and quality assurance, not only for the product but throughout the company, from human resources to customer support, from public facing digital surfaces to internal tools.
But if we are not a start up, then we must develop a gradual plan with short and long term goals, key performance indicators, implementation roadmap, knowledge management and knowledge transfer, user testing, re-evaluations and so on. Should we only reach toward conformance to latest WCAG on level AA or should we also target AAA? Maybe our user base would really benefit from some of the AAA success criteria.
How to get there – from plan to action
It helps to use the maturity model for planning where we want to be as well. After we define where we are we know better what to do to improve. To mature to the next level. This is, as always, an overall responsibility. Works best if it comes from top down, when key stakeholders with budgets make it a clear agenda for the organization, when knowledge is systematically improved and when progress is tracked.
I’ve observed that even key stakeholders with great intentions may give up on the implementation if they are not getting feedback on progress. It really helps to let them observe the user feedback trends and sometimes even real users feedback. We are all humans, so human factor is key. Sometimes stakeholders are aware of importance of accessibility due to their own disability or disability of somebody close to them and can really understand the reasoning. But key is again common awareness and common knowledge about responsibilities and methodologies that make content, design and code accessible.
WCAG maturity model covers much more
I really suggest that you read W3C Accessibility Maturity Model – Draft Community Group Report (opens in new window) for yourself and place it into your companies context. There are a lot of sound advice about different stages in different parts of your organization and I strongly believe they will be of value to you. Document is still a draft, but already offers a lot and hopefully it will also get the deserved attention.
