- Hi, everyone, and welcome to our discussion, Creating Inclusive Customer Experience Through Digital Accessibility. I am your panelist host today, Mark Miller, and our discussion today is really with a whole group of people that are very passionate about advancing digital accessibility programs at their organizations and that are focused on creating inclusive customer experience. So with that, it is my pleasure to introduce our panel to you. Lori Samuels, who is senior director of accessibility at NBC University, and that's perfect. I know people can see your names, but if you guys can wave when I introduce you, that would be wonderful. Karen Williams, who's the accessibility lead for the Digital Accessibility Center of Excellence team at TIAA, and then Jaunita George, who is QA ADA analyst at Navy Federal Credit Union, analyst three, if we're being specific, and then Mala Dabideen, who is the manager at I and IT Accessibility Center of Excellence, the ACOE for the Ontario Public Service, and then Corinne Major, who's sitting next to her, who is the team lead for I and IT Accessibility Center for the Ontario Public Service. Welcome, everyone. I really appreciate you being here, and I know our audience does too. And to the audience, as we have this discussion, like I said, we really appreciate you being here, but we want you also to be part of the discussion. So please feel free to enter questions into the Q&A, and I will keep an eye on that throughout the discussion and make sure that those get to our panelists. So the first thing I wanna discuss, or I want you all to discuss today is just really how you got started and how you got your team started. Everybody here is working with or is part of or started a great accessibility team or organization, and I know that there's a lot of other people and organizations out there that really are wondering how to do that. It can seem like a big task, and understanding where to start I think can be very difficult. There's a lot of just things to think about, and it can be overwhelming when you really look at all the things that need to be done from the perspective of accessibility. So if you guys could kind of explain how you ended up where you are and how this all formed for you, that would be wonderful, and I will leave it to you to volunteer to jump in. If you don't, I'll pick somebody. - I will jump 'cause I don't want you picking. - All right, thank you very much. - [Karen] Really, thank you. I'm so excited, again, to be here. I am Karen Williams, the accessibility lead at TIAA, and so excited to share any wealth of knowledge, but how we got started, I always say we went from silo to center. TIAA is structured that we have three legs. So we have TIAA the enterprise piece, and then we have TIAA Bank and we have . And in all three of those environments, we had accessibility experts. They were working hard, but there was very limited resources. Everyone was doing their own thing, own processes, own tools, and so it was a separate entity, and I was there probably three years as a consultant, and that's where I came in. It was only two of us stateside for TIAA.org, and the other two were in India resources. And we had one expert for TIAA Bank. And then we were helping in lending our resources to the area. But in July of 2021, we had a great revelation and that was to restructure and really build our accessibility team, thinking about the framework and how we were could come together. And so the Digital Accessibility Center of Excellence was formed. And what that did was allowed all of us to come under one umbrella, bringing all of the accessibility experts. So what that did was increase our resources and having one centralized location for the entire team. And then we took kind of four areas of focus. That was governance, how we would govern, how we would create policies and procedures for accessibility, that we'd focus on reporting and auditing and testing. Then we had another area of growth, how we would expand, how we would measure, and how we would create strategies for what we wanted to do. And then, of course, we had to include training because you have to always account for people not knowing what to do, how to do accessibility throughout your organization. So we really went from working individually to really unifying ourselves under one umbrella, which is the Digital Accessibility Center of Excellence. And I'll tip it off to someone else. - Thanks, Karen. That's really a wonderful description, and what I like about it is that you really described that condition of having limited resources and being in what I would label as kind of an ad hoc scenario, where a lot of people in your organization were concerned with accessibility and doing things with accessibility, but they had kind of figured out their own ways to do it, and what you did is bring that all together and create consistency and measurability and all sorts of things around it that's associated with having an organized group of people together, you know? - Yeah, and let me be clear, that was just not my brainstorm. So let me be very clear of that. - We'll give other people credit for it too. - [Karen] Yes, absolutely, 'cause I actually was started as a consultant for three years and just literally got hired as a TIAA associate basically two weeks ago. - Okay. - But I've been with the accessibility team forever, but we now have a director of accessibility, which we never had. We now have eight, really nine different resources and experts, some who have credentials, some who have been in the field for over 20 years. And so it's an exciting time, but I definitely take no credit for that structure. I had nothing to do with that. - All right, we'll give credit to somebody else then. - [Karen] Thank you. - So what about the rest of you when pulling your teams together? I mean, do you see a similar situation where you were really kind of ad hoc, struggling with resources? LORI, I saw your hand kind of- - Yeah, I'll speak to this a bit, and I kind of gonna pull from a few different experiences at different companies 'cause I've been on both the startup phase of an accessibility program and kind of the more mature end of it. So I would say, kind of in the startup phase, it may start, and it has in fact started here at NBC Universal with a recognition by leadership that we need to invest more and we need leadership in this space in digital accessibility. So that recognition happened several years ago here. I was brought on about two and a half years, almost two and a half years ago now to kind of start pulling together an enterprise program. Our parent company, Comcast, has a mature accessibility program and team, but they weren't, you know, we still sort of operate, you know, discreetly, and so we needed to bring it into this business, which is itself a collection of multiple businesses. So the interesting thing is positioned now in our legal organization, but we're spanning across sports, parks, NBC, you know, film and television, Peacock. You know, a lot of it has been relationship building, advocacy work, partnering closely, and I'm very excited about this piece 'cause digital accessibility sometimes gets placed in compliance organizations or technology organizations, and those are fine, but what I'm seeing now is the opportunity to partner more closely with folks who are focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and connecting those dots has been amazing because, you know, you can't have diversity without disability, and you can't have equity without accessibility. So we really need to be joined more at the hip, and that's what we're doing now strategically. So exactly what Karen said, kind of building out a center of excellence operationally with accessibility and our digital product teams need to take ownership, and that's starting to happen as well, so that they have dedicated resources focusing on accessibility within the product teams, but we don't want to be duplicative of efforts where there's an opportunity to have central training resources or some of the central vendor management that we would do. That just kind of incubates and accelerates the opportunity for our businesses to take advantage of resources that that can be funded out of the central team. So I think we're evolving this towards the hub and spoke model of a central team with dedicated resources within the businesses, and we have a little ways to go, for sure, but it's exciting work. So that's where we are. - Couple of great points there. I mean, the whole sort of marriage with diversity, equity, inclusion, I see that a lot, and I think that that's an important concept for people to be thinking about, but I really love the way that you described the efficiency created when you start to pull a group like this together that have common resource needs. I think that was a great point. How about the rest of you that haven't spoken? - Yeah. - [Mark] Go ahead. - Corinne and I can jump in now, Mark. So it's interesting to hear Karen and Lori tell their stories in private sector organizations or in the banking industry. We work for the Ontario government in Canada, and our story is almost exactly the same. You know, the interest and the push for having some sort of centralized group or some larger focus on a group of experts was born out of legislation being created that made this the law and then a recognition across the board pretty much that, okay, well, we've got a law now. We're telling people that they have to meet these standards, but we're not telling them how. They don't actually know how. So our organization, which Corinne can speak to, was started back in 2007. And you know, the difference here is I joined the journey years and years and years later as a manager of this team, and I can talk a little bit about what that looked like, but Corinne actually was part of the team right from the inception, so she's got a bit of that unique perspective on she actually helped create the mandate and built this team. And we serve an Ontario government public service of over 60,000 employees across various ministries and IT divisions in every, you know, sector that you could imagine that any statewide, or provincial wide in our case, government would touch. So yeah, Corinne. - When we first started the I and IT Accessibility Center of Excellence back in 2007, we did start very similar to what you were saying, Karen, with a very small team. I think there was only about three of us at that time, and it was, you know, recently with the introduction of that legislation. So we really had to focus on, you know, learning the web content accessibility guidelines, understanding what that meant and how we could apply that to all of our websites, web applications, and web content, the existing stuff, but also moving forward with anything new that we were developing. So it really evolved over time. So we did start as a very small little unit where we were just almost a bit of an education awareness. We started a little bit of testing for folks internally, but it has evolved over the last, I don't know, however- - Three years. - It's evolved incredibly. We have a variety of services that we actually offer internally to staff, including a testing service so staff can actually submit some of their websites, web applications that they're working on, and we will provide some feedback. We have a full education and training program that we provide. We do IT project consultation, so a bit of accessibility coaching for people who are developing new applications or procuring new applications as well. So it's completely evolved over the years. I would say that we're probably at a mature state as in the center of excellence now, but always room for improvement as evolving standards happen, new technologies are emerged. We've been diving into the mobile accessibility world a little bit more now. - Something I wanted to pick up on really quickly and similarities of our stories, and I especially picked it up with what Karen said. Three years ago, I was approached about a management opportunity within this team, and it was presented to me as being we want to reduce our reliance on contracts, fee for service, going out to vendors to come in and play very specific roles like accessibility testing because we're hiring, you know, dozens or hundreds of vendors to come in and play these roles individually for short stints of time. They come in with the expertise, but then they leave with the expertise. So how do we evolve, and how do we transition to build up our internal capacity within our teams? And what they recognized at that point, you know, Karen, you mentioned that there's finally a director in place. In our case, this was the first time that they actually put a manager and part of the hierarchical structure within the organization. They recognize the importance of putting that within that type of organizational structure so that we could get some more momentum and actually build this out into a true enterprise service. So Corinne just explained some of those services. We were heavily reliant on vendors to provide those in and out, right? Like, they were coming in and out on contracts. Now we have no vendors within our team, and the services that we procure vendors from are the solutions, right, like Arc, for example. So that's where we rely on those services outside, but the expertise, we've worked really, really hard to build up that knowledge so that we can become a centralized source of expertise. And, you know, our great team is only about nine, 10 people right now, and we're hoping to expand that, but it's a good start. - [Mark] Yeah, that's such an important part of maturity is when that expertise is in place, that's when you know. And when it's sort of consistent, you know, when the information, the best practices, the expertise is consistent within the organization. I also liked the way you really describe sort of the journey and starting from the beginning. I think that maybe a lot of people listening, you know, are wondering like, how do we do this? And it's important to understand that there is no light switch. It's not gonna happen for you overnight. The real question is, is what is the first step that we need to take? And you really, Mala and Corinne, you both really described that kind of journey really well. And I think that can be comforting to people to understand that, like, you're not gonna, you know, it's not Superman in a phone booth spinning around, right? It takes step by step by step. - And you're gonna make mistakes. - Yeah. - And it's okay, right. - Exactly. - And you'll learn from it. And you'll like, Karen said, you just keep evolving, and you keep- - Evolving. Evolving. - [Mala] Right, exactly. - And modernizing, improving as things change. You know, that's probably one of the things I like the best about, you know, the accessibility field and working in the center of excellence for so long is that, you know, it's always changing, and I really like that. I like having to, you know, look at new industry best practices and standards and seeing how we can make our processes more streamlined and efficient as well, so. - Yeah, the industry itself is certainly also evolving, right. It's on a similar path. So Jaunita, talk to us a little bit about what you've done over or you've seen over at Navy Fed and done over at Navy Fed. - So we've always put our members first. So accessibility has been central to our mission and has been a part of our culture. And over the past couple of years, what we've done is we've created a digital, we call it the digital allies community of practice, and really, they lead up our enterprise training and awareness initiative. Last year, we ended up creating a role-based training curriculum that provided role-based training to, gosh, we had 562 folks who went through that training program, received role-based training. Automatic assignments, you know, were set up so that an additional 295 employees received role-based training right at onboarding. We had an awareness campaign, which, you know, was created and really communicated across the organization through this cross-functional community of practice, and we reached 11,600 employees through that campaign last year. So really, and those two particular initiatives started a couple of years back, and how we did it, we started, we had always had great leadership buy-in, you know, accessibility just really at the highest levels of the organization is we have a commitment there. And so what we did was we went down to the grassroots, and we involved folks across the organization. We spent time building relationships, and from there created a plan to, you know, communicate more about digital accessibility and really raise that awareness. So days like this, like GAAD, it's being communicated across the organization as we speak. And really, people wanna get involved when, you know, we talk about digital accessibility. It's something that folks wanna volunteer for even or learn more about, and we create those opportunities for employees to get involved, and that's really helped our program grow exponentially. So what I would say to organizations starting, you know, from the ground up is to start from the ground up and to really leverage, find your champions, find your allies, and really leverage that and create something new and amazing. So it can be an engine for innovation. You can have accessibility hackathons. You know, just get the word out there and folks will join you. - Yeah, I mean, you said a couple of great things in there, and I think that that, you know, the first thing that is just the buy-in from leadership. Like, when you have leadership buying in, all these other things become just that much easier. When you don't have leadership buying in, and you're trying to evangelize to leadership, that in and of itself is a pretty big barrier that needs to be overcome before you can move forward. And then I absolutely just love how you evangelize across the organization and created an entire culture, not just inside the center of excellence, but the whole organization that had opportunities and gained awareness around accessibility. That's really fantastic, and I think that that's something to look at. And we always say, as you're moving through stages of maturity as an organization, that is wonderful, right. That is when you know you're starting to get mature, but the sort of final part of that is when you're doing this kind of event, when you're saying we, we're trailblazers, like all of you are, so much so that we're going to tell the world what we're doing. That's when you really know you've kind of pulled something together that's working. So my next sort of topic for you all, right, this sounds great, right? We're all set. We'll start at the beginning, work our way up. We'll all be just like you all are, and it'll be wonderful, but I think it was Corinne who pointed out at some point that there's a couple stumbling blocks and mistakes that happen along the way that it's not quite as smooth of a ride as everybody would hope. So can you tell me about some of these challenges that, as you were maturing into the state that you're at right now, what are some of the big roadblocks, the big challenges, the things that you had to overcome to keep moving forward and get to where you are right now? - Yeah. - [Karen] Oh, I'm sorry. - Why don't you go ahead, Karen. We'll keep the same. - [Karen] Okay. - Same rhythm here. - Accessibility and trying to really conquer that and champion that is challenging in itself because first you have to get your business partners and your teammates and everyone else involved, you gotta kinda have them sit in the seats of someone who's disabled for them to really get it. And so a lot of the barriers and challenges was people knew the word accessibility, but didn't understand why it was important. Why is this vital to our organization? Why is this vital to our customers? My concept has always been, if I can get up 2:00 AM in the morning and access my digital platform, someone who's visually impaired should also have that same right, and so I'm gonna fight until that's done. 'Cause I think a lot of the challenge is we really need to start internalizing it and saying, if this was me, would I want my team to look forward to better tools? One of the things that was really challenging for us is that, especially when we were in our silo areas, we had different techniques, different tools, different processes, different perceptions. They were all good in its own environment, but when you come together, and when we came together as a center of excellence, we had to audit and look at, you know, what is the best tech stacks? What are the best tools that's gonna help us remediate and catch some of these low hanging fruits and really get a big bang for our bucks, and what are the resources? We have on our team, not just testers, but we have communicators. We have those who partner with, who are consultants, because what we are finding out is that you can test all day, and you can report out all day, and you can talk till your head is blue, but the bottom line is that if you don't have an integration of all of those skills, the car is not gonna move. The initiatives are not gonna move. And so what we found out is that we have to do it more than one way. And so we initiated, and then we couldn't keep it all to ourselves because the pain we were feeling was the pain our developers and our QA testers, they were feeling the same pain. And one of the huge initiatives from our senior level was do not let any product go out here that is inaccessible. Well, that was a huge thing, and the resources were low. But with the new team, we established a test as you go strategy. And with that strategy in place, we were able to kind of walk hand in hand through the process. We connected with our Scrum managers, we've connected with the Scrum team. We connected with our POs, our business analysts, and the developers, and the QAs, and we provided the tools and the techniques and the best practices so as we are going through the stumbling blocks, they can actually see it, and then we walk them through this process to show them how to remediate it. So it's not all on us as an accessibility team, but we are kind of training the trainer. And so realizing the barriers and understanding that you're gonna have those barriers in place, do not be naive thinking that this is gonna be, once I get an accessibility team, a center of excellence, it's gonna all pan out. Well, you know, I always say I have so many sayings. I don't know who I think I am, but you can always get the automobile. You can always put the right pupil on the bus, but putting them in the right seat and getting the right skill set and integrating those skills to communicate with your business partners so that they become champions and they understand the barriers and that you'll get a better, better momentum with your initiative program. - Yeah, that's excellent. And, you know, I really love that some of the concepts that you pointed out in there, like, you know, test as you go, you know, so much accessibility happens after the fact, especially in that newer environment that is a little more ad hoc. It's like, all right, we built this thing. Now let's take a look at the accessibility. - Right. - [Mark] But a lot of success comes into play when you shift that left and you start building it into the process from the beginning, right. I also think one of the really good points that you made, Karen, was that it's hard for people to understand until they sit in the seat of a person with a disability. And I can tell you, from the perspective of somebody, I have a disability, right. I have ADD and dyslexia both, but I don't compare myself to somebody who's blind, for instance, and working in an environment with people who are blind and have other types of disabilities and knowing them as well as I do, I still get it wrong, right. I still sometimes will witness something or have a conversation and go, I never thought of that, right. So the idea that we can anticipate and understand what a person with a disability needs is really, you know, you can't. You need to talk to that individual, and sitting in their shoes for a little bit can help you give that empathy that really helps you understand and listen well. - Yeah, and- Oh, sorry. - Jaunita, go ahead. Go ahead. - Part and parcel with that is doing user testing with a diverse panel that includes people with disabilities and sharing out those insights across the organization. You wouldn't believe just what you can learn and what others can learn by watching somebody with a disability, you know, use your application and seeing the struggles firsthand, if there are struggles, and, you know, or the features that they find most valuable. You know, it really helps you build a better product and helps you build bridges. So there's that. Also, I think, you know, the W3C has, so we're members of the W3C, and they have a RACI matrix. So if you're trying to, as a lot of organizations, you're trying to shift accessibility left in the process, and how you do that is by clearly defining where accessibility lives in the software development life cycle, also, what parts of accessibility that each role actually owns. And the W3C's RACI matrix is a really good place to start if you look at their research there. So, you know, that's something I recommend, also looking at their user personas that they just created. If you look at the making content usable, user personas that were drafted there, it can really give you a sense more about the types of users, you know, that are out there. Also, it's a great resource to share across the organization as well, so really recommend taking a look at those. - [Mark] Great, great recommendation. - I think these are all great points, and, you know, from perspective of challenges, I think one of the bigger ones is that we still don't have enough working knowledge in each of these critical roles that are involved in creating digital content or digital product experiences, user experiences. So we have awesome designers and front end developers and quality engineers and product owners, and I say, we, this is sort of collectively. It's a global issue, but they're not coming out of their educational experiences with skill sets in accessibility. We're not teaching accessibility in universities or coding boot camps, and that's a huge problem because what ends up happening is, just, again, at a very systemic level, it's up to private organizations or public sector organizations to do all this heavy lift on training. And I think, you know, I think Teach Access, the nonprofit organization that's kind of focusing on this problem space, is, you know, the long term solution is that if anyone's gonna be involved in creating technology that people interact with or creating digital content that people interact with, which is a lot of us now, right, 'cause we're all emailing and sending documents. I mean, everyone's doing this every day. We've gotta get people educated about the fact that you have to consider people with disabilities and then, you know, in that process and here's how to do it. And I think the other critical point, which Jaunita just started to touch on there, is every program that's focusing on accessibility must center people with disabilities at the heart of it. This is about people with disabilities. It's about people who use assistive technology. It's about people who are neurodiverse and may have different ways or needs of accessing content. We've gotta center on people with disabilities and put usability over compliance in that regard. The standards from W3C, the WCAG standards are great. They're just a guide though. There're definitely not a way to ensure that we're getting to a usable experience. We can only do that if we are centering on the actual user experience, and that's user research, bringing people with disabilities in, hopefully hiring more people with disabilities into your organizations to be part of the creative process. So that's my soapbox on involve people with disabilities. - I always say, you know, WACG is the floor, not the ceiling. - [Mark] Right. - [Karen] Yeah, and if I could piggyback off of one thing Lori said, and that is we're within the UX team. So we're heavy on custom experience. We work with designers and content strategists. And so we are at the forefront, and we always try, and I always get back to this, we always try to get them to kind of see it from someone who's disabled. Your design is beautiful. We don't want to take away from that. Your design can still be innovative. It really can. Your content can still be engaging. We just want you to consider something else. So as you're communicating, don't, for those of who are just really starting with accessibility and trying to get your program off the ground, and you're getting upset and frustrated because they don't get it, you really have to be patient with your partnerships, with consulting, with communication, and really hone in on it's not about the product, it's about the person. It's not about the tool, it's about the individual who's gonna use our platform. So once you get them to see that and understand that as a designer, as a content strategist, that maybe this verbiage might sound a little offensive, we might wanna try this. So I think it's a whole lot of communication that really needs to take place, even from the accessibility experts, that there's just a gentle way, I call it the softer side of accessibility, to get others to understand that world. - I think it's, I mean, this is the heart of accessibility, right, this sort of people first discussion, and it really brings up an important I think distinction between technical conformance, as Jaunita put it, sort of the floor, which is the WCAG guidelines, and actual usability, right? Can the people use this, and who else can you listen to but the people? Mala and Corinne, do you have, you know, what kind of struggles did you guys experience as you were maturing? - Absolutely. So all of the points that everybody else has made, I think we've, at some point in our process, had those challenges as well. As you were all talking, I just keep thinking back to all of those different times throughout our I guess maturity. Definitely knowledge is one of the biggest challenges that we have. We have, you know, as Mala said, many employees across the organization, many project teams, lots of different pieces across the whole board. It's getting that accessibility information to all those people and letting them know how they can utilize that information and put it into play and realizing that not one person is responsible for accessibility. It is something that each and every one of us is accountable for that we need to actually put that into play within our web content. So we really, you know, had challenges kind of driving that message through that every single one of us is creating content in our day to day, right? Absolutely every single one of us, whether it's gonna be emails, you know, content you're uploading to your internet sites, your SharePoint sites, you know, and it kind of branches outside of even those web applications that we may be developing. So one of those challenges definitely was, you know, getting that across, that every one of us has some sort of responsibility for accessibility, and we needed to get that information across in a way that people, you know, understood what best practices, what requirements, what they actually have to do and put it into play for depending on what content that they had created. So, you know, we still I think struggle a little bit with that today, but we've been trying to implement a variety of different learning techniques across the organization. So we have videos, we're going to be starting on eLearning, checklists, tips sheets, just trying our best to, you know, recognize that everybody has a different way of learning and helping them try to and supporting them as best as we can to understand that information and apply it to their specific situation. I'll jump in, I'll say one of the issues with knowledge gaps, which I think is going to be relatable to everybody here, is when your organization does not require something, when there is not a very, very crystal clear prioritization that this is an expectation, and it's sort of a back of your mind, you know, more ideology or a goal that, yeah, we know we should achieve this, and this would be great to do, but it's not a requirement. That knowledge gap is just going to permeate, and it becomes part of the culture of where you work, and that's quite the obstacle to overcome. Karen, much earlier, you talked about how the linkage, and, Mark, you spoke to this too, the importance of linking disability and accessibility into equity, diversity, and inclusion. We're only now starting to have those conversations in a centralized way where people are making those linkages, and interestingly enough, that really, really sparked up for two reasons within the Ontario government, one, as part of feedback received through conducting research on what we can do to become a more anti-racist organization, and that came in as a lot of feedback from people from the disability community but also just generally of, you know, here's a big gap of, you know, areas that are not considered or there's still discrimination, and a lot of it is unintentional, right, in the way that we build our solutions and our policies and practices. And then the other one, I would say that that really sparked the discussion around equity and inclusion and how we build and how we design is that focus on user-centric design. And that's starting to become more and more of a mindset of if we don't start to consider some of these principles and practices right from the get go, by the time, you know, you're ready to implement, we're constantly going to get trapped in the exact same trap that we've always been stuck in, the same loophole, where we spend forever, years and years and money and time and people remediating rather than having a really great solution right from the get go, where, if anything, we're making adjustments to, you know, as accessibility evolves. We're not unique to that, you know. It's government, so I'm just gonna venture and say that because we're government, we're probably slower to evolve because everything is, you know, that much, and I'm saying this to people who work in the banking industry, but I'm willing to stake money on that everything is a little bit more bureaucratic or a little bit more red tape even at the banking industry. So it can be, you know, quite a challenge. The other big one that I see, and I wonder if other people have this, is there's a lack of accountability, centralized accountability of who owns accessibility. As Corinne said, it has to be a responsibility of everyone, but who actually owns it in our organization, that's still remains sort of a, you know, just an unknown. If it belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one, right? And if there's no centralized real accountability on it, there's no real standard. So the examples that Corinne talked about on training and checklists and all that stuff, that's our effort to try to fill those gaps and say because there's a lack of standardization, we'll try to create some tools, but we also don't have the power to mandate those tools. We're a center of excellence. We're here to teach you best practices, but we don't actually have that power to say you must. So that's still a challenge to us. We haven't overcome that. - Mark, if I, I know we have to move to another question, but if I can just piggy back- - No, you're good. You're fine, go ahead. - [Karen] Off of what Mala said. One thing I remember in our silo environment, that was one of the huge, huge barriers. Who owns accountability? Who owns it? Like, who owns it? And we could never get that. As of July, 2021, we now know who owns it, and everyone owns it, and we communicate that. One of the biggest things that, when we got started with the new team that we have, one of the biggest wins was when we started running the ARC tool. And we took six of our core sites, and we ran the ARC tool scan, and that was able to catch, you know, what was the issues of these particular sites. And we prioritized those. We said this was severity one, two, and three, where one was the worst case scenario. It was a huge blocker, and someone with assistive technology could not use your website, and these were the issues. Once we reported out, we took those reports, prioritized them, and then we connected with what we call the trains, you know, within the SDLC process. We actually committed ourselves to connect with those business partners, our project managers, and said, hey, these are your issues. And so now we are shifting ownership from us to we. And so now it's not just we. We've shown you where the issues are, and now let's try to remediate that through your own process. And then, again, it goes back to the test as you go strategy. And then as you use the tools and techniques, you'll be able to see. And so now we are putting ownership, not just on the accessibility team, but also on the developers, on the Scrum master, we are putting it all on everyone because, even on the designers. I mean, everyone has that accountability, but I think the start of it is let's do, and the automated is not going to catch everything, but it can catch those things that get people's attention. And once you start... When we started with the six core sites in July, as of within six months, we now have four of those sites that are within what we call a great density score of five, and so that means that those issues were put back into the SDLC or into those trains, and the Scrum master and the project managers looked at remediating those issues, those issues were resolved, and now everyone is aware of, hey, this was really our accountability as well. So I think the good start is definitely do that automated testing and let them see these are the issues on the page that you developed, the product that you developed, the platform that you developed. - We took a slightly different approach. So I guess now at our program, in our program and on most of our product teams, we actually focus on not having accessibility issues to remediate at all. And how we do that is we approach, we have an accessibility designed mindset. So we, from the outset, have the requirements drawn up so that we understand, you know, how are the applications going to work with folks with disabilities from the start, and we developed to that. And what that's done for us is really taken us from a, you know, having to remediate findings and such to not having findings at all. And I think that's definitely where folks wanna get to you. You have to approach it from the design process, because that adds, what, 5% to your development timeline, but when you're remediating applications and fixing it and retrofitting for accessibility and not baking it in, that can double or even triple your development time. And so you really have to tell those stories, you know, and make that business case, and that will help you secure the resources you need to really expand your accessibility program and get developers who know accessible development, for instance, or designers who know accessible design or build those inhouse, so. - I think that's absolutely the ultimate goal. You know, the challenge is that that's a journey in and of itself, right. You've got, especially in a really large enterprise with lots and lots of digital products and content, and, you know, it's an evolution to driving. I think it's a combination of both, right. You want to drive down those critical issues so that there's not the blockers like Karen was saying, you know, that the things that make it like an absolute obstacle to using the website or the mobile app, and while at the same time, you're kind of building up your capacity and capability to address these issues up front in design. You know, the kind of good news, bad news about the digital world, right, is that it's constantly changing. So the good news is that we can invest our energy and our resources into that upfront design and then carry forward through accessible development for the front end and all of that. We can sort of teach our teams to do that while we're simultaneously trying to burn down against some critical issues. And I think if you combine those, and you really have as your long term strategy that you're gonna be absolutely accessible by design, accessible at launch, that's where we gotta get to. And I think that's where, when we invest that energy there, it's going to pay off. It might take a little time, but you also don't... The risk I see sometimes of the, you know, assess and remediate approach to accessibility, it's necessary, but there's also a risk of burning teams out a bit and getting them kind of demotivated. Like, they're starting to feel like accessibility is this kind of compliance tax instead of something that's motivating and inspiring, which is, hey, we're gonna make our experiences work for everyone, and that's actually something that everybody can get behind. So, you know, I think we just have to kind of use the tools that our disposal and sort of guide them with some wisdom toward, you know, absolutely invest in that shift left strategy so that we are building accessible to begin with. And then at the same time, let's at least try to get those blockers out of there so that we're, you know, we're making it a usable experience now. So that's, yeah. - Lori, I love the concept that you threw out there of working in parallel on the two sides of that software development life cycle. You can be burning down existing things and assessing them and fixing them, and at the same time, start shifting left and figuring out how do we start this in the design phase? How do we, to Karen's point, you know, how do we test as we go versus waiting until it lands in production or whatever the case is? And I think that so many folks get locked onto that. I've got a problem now. I need to assess this and fix it, and then they kind of have this feeling of doneness, which really isn't a thing, you know? And before they know it, a year later, they're going away. Right back where we started. - Absolutely. - [Mark] What happened, you know? But if you think about all of that all at once, and work it in parallel, I think that that's great. - It's not a project, it's a practice. I like to tell people. - [Mark] I love that thing. Yeah, kit's not a project, it's a practice. And I also think the idea of tension, Karen, that you kind of put on this is a fantastic one, that one of the struggles I think a lot of people have is they are a center of excellence, and it's like, we should be doing this, we should be doing this, we should be doing this, but it's not until you develop things like accountability, and you create requirements and all of that, and you put tension on the task that it starts to actually happen. I think that was good. And also, Corinne, you had mentioned about just educating and how difficult that can be, and the fact that people learn differently, and I really appreciate that. As somebody who did matriculate with dyslexia and ADD, I was not able to learn in the same manner as most of the people around me, and when I learned alternative methods, it helps. So I think that it's, you know, it's really like the effort itself, you know. So a lot of, you know, just a lot of great points and a lot of great things to think about. From here, where do you all see yourself going? You know, we've had a great conversation about blending diversity, equity, and inclusion in with this, you know, what's kind of now for a lot of people a separate effort around accessibility, but I think that that's probably one of the newer concepts that's really starting to emerge out of the practice of accessibility and diversity, equity, and inclusion. You know, I think that's a great example of kind of next steps that people might be thinking about. What are you all thinking about is your next step in your next, like level of maturity that you might be striving for? And that's silence. People go, we don't know. - I'm the jumper. - [Mark] Is there a panel we can listen to that's done the next step? - [Karen] I'll jump out here. - Karen, go ahead. - I think our next step, and I appreciate Lori's comment because definitely, Jaunita as well, is that integration of remediating and let's left shift has got to happen hands down. I love that comment. Okay, so to answer your question, going forward, we are really excited at TIAA. I think if anyone is really trying to move their accessibility program forward, we are real excited, probably within the last year, we have a new CEO, T, who likes to be called T, Thasunda Brown, and she has laid down the foundation of a new strategy and new values. And what I love about it is that we now have to connect these values to what we do every day, and the values that TIAA has, you know, I'm probably a nerd because two of them are definitely my values, and that's putting the client first, and definitely we have to do that, and what we are doing within our organization and with the accessibility team as a whole, we're starting to build strategies and processes to align with our values. So I think for anyone who's getting ready to develop an accessibility program, look at your values of your institution, of your organization, and connect and align your values with your processes and your initiatives. You'll get more value. You'll get more input and more buy-in from your execs definitely, but you'll also, for example, I'll give you one. One of our values is deliver with excellence. That means that we are gonna continue improving for our clients hands down. So we know that in the accessibility world, you have to keep improving our tools, our skillset, our knowledge. It's ever growing. It's never ending. And so I think to connect our values to what we do into our program, our initiatives, our next levels. We are a very young accessibility team as of July. And so we are learning as we go, but in that, we are learning to align our values of our organization to what we do for our clients and definitely keeping them first at the forefront. So we're looking at better processes, better strategies, better focal point, and definitely better partnership with DEI. We actually just committed time with them and that partnership with Disability:IN, who's a great resource. I would recommend them to anyone. They're just a great resource, but they're helping TIAA with a lot of our disability equity index so we can assess where we are as an organization and get the real truth of where we are. Do we have things in place, not just on the digital front, but beyond? And so that's where we're doing is trying to fill those gaps to make sure that we serve the customers that we have been geared to serve. - Great, great, great points. So what are the rest of your guys thinking about in terms of, yeah, go ahead, Lori. - No, just really quickly, 'cause I wanna get everybody a chance to talk. Our next steps are leadership conversations. So we've done some good grassroots community building somewhat more to formalize on that in terms of kind of a real framework, but I think, at this point, our next strategic steps are getting our business leaders and across the different functional areas of the business to have the right executive level and leadership level conversations so that the there's a greater awareness of the need to put the resources into the work and address gaps and also, you know, do that transformation from, you know, into a leadership position in the space, and what does that look like for our industry, for, you know, and those are the conversations that we're having next. So, excited about that. - Lori, I'm glad you added that. We're doing an IT manager roadshow right now that we kicked off a week or two ago. And while that, you know, it's important where we belong to an IT organization with our team, and we're here primarily to support all the IT divisions within the government. However, we do also support all of our business partners, and they're ultimately the product owners. You know, they're the ones who have to put their name and their signatures behind everything. So you just gave me an idea here that maybe our next step in this is actually expanding that roadshow to the business managers across the board because they're the ones ultimately, like I said, they put their name on these products, and they're likely the ones who's gonna be able to push behind the scenes to say this is a priority for us. - Yeah. - One thing I'll say that a big lessons learned that I've had from Corinne over the last few years, and she's laughing, but it's true. It's the importance of leading by example. And it's something as small as a template. You know, when we're going out with a communication or an email or a slide deck, whatever format that you're using to provide presentations, Corinne is one of these people who, you know, just down to the T, she tries to make sure that every single person on the team is testing that product, you know, running it through JAWS or some other type of screen reader and testing it using every methodology that we have in place. The idea there being, you know, if we want to promote best practices, we have to start by being one. So that's certainly something that I've learned from Corinne, and that is something that we're trying to do better and better and better at. And what we have found is that people start coming to us saying can you guys help us create templates so that we would just have, you know, something kind of standardized that we can use that they don't have to keep thinking about this over and over. And then I'll throw it over to Corinne 'cause she's got some more ideas. - One of the things we're currently working on is kind of like a role-based training as well. I think, Jaunita, you were talking about role-based training earlier in the conversation. So we're really, you know, trying to get out to specific roles to provide, you know, kind of like targeted training, right. So we just introduced, along with some of our partners across the organization, a developers community of practice. So all of the IT developers can come together and share their experiences, their ideas, all of the different, common, you know, accessible, you know, platforms, whatever they're using. Just have a way for people to share their knowledge and experience with each other. So we've started with developers. I'm sure maybe we'll expand it too to other groups, you know, in the future, but I know Mala was talking a little bit about managers there, and one of the key pieces that we're gonna come out with, hopefully in the fall too, is a manager's toolkit. So we're gonna try and, you know, create these resources that will help and support those particular roles to move forward in their accessibility journeys as well with, you know, the support of the center of excellence, you know, to help them along the way, but give them the tools and the resources that they need in a way that's easily, you know, I guess accessed by them so that they can, you know, move in that, as I said, accessibility journey and, you know, deliver those accessible products as best they can. So definitely role-based training, so Jaunita, maybe we'll connect after, see if you have any additional ideas there. - Oh yeah, definitely. Happy to help, so we actually call ours the Accessibility Academy. - You know. - [Corinne] Love it. - [Jaunita] Yeah. - I have a feeling this whole panel's gonna be chatting with each other. You did it how? You did what? We're trying to do that. You know, I think that there's a lot. It is just amazing to me, you know, like, this, the whole concept I think that has evolved out of this conversation or kind of the place that we've ended up is that accessibility starts as this thing that we think of as accessibility, right, and we may even point to our public facing website and say, geez, people with disabilities need to access this, and we need an audit, or something as basic as that, but in this discussion, I think that it's really risen to the surface that when you're really doing accessibility right, it starts to transcend accessibility itself. It starts to become part of leadership, of diversity, equity, and inclusion. You know, you talk about role-based training. It starts to affect all the different roles in the organization. And I think that, Karen, your comments about how important it is to tie the company's values into everything that you do and to have accessibility be one of those values, it starts as this little by itself thing, but when it blossoms to the state where you guys have gotten it to in your organizations, it really does become something bigger than itself that supports the entire organization and all of its efforts and makes everything, everyone better in the process. So that's what I got out of listening to you guys, and we are at time, and I hope we had a great audience here, and I hope that you guys all kind of saw some similar stuff, heard some things that might help you out, and I can't thank this group enough. I've been in this business for a long time, and I think it has learned a ton of stuff. And a ton of stuff I did know has been confirmed because, you know, you guys all have actually made it there. You've done it. This is not theory. It's not anything like that. You're running organizations that do all the stuff that you're talking about perfectly, maybe not quite yet, but you're striving for that, and you're making adjustments, and it's a real effort and real achievements that you guys have all made. - Thank you all. - [Mark] Kudos to everyone. I really appreciate all of you. Fantastic discussion. Thanks to everyone who listened. And with that, I'll let everybody go. And if you're on the east coast, enjoy your lunch. - Thank you. - Thank you. - Bye. - [Mark] Bye. - Bye.