- [Marisa] Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We will start in about one minute, just waiting for as many people as we can to arrive. So, give us just a minute. Hi, everyone. Thank you very much for attending our webinar today. I'd like to introduce you to you, David Sloan, he's the UX Practice Manager and Accessibility Engineer at TPGi, and he will be conducting this webinar today. Just a few housekeeping elements, we do have captioning on. So, you can turn on that option on your own computer. If you would like, we do have the webinar oh, sorry, the deck for the webinar available after the webinar ends. If you would like that, please email ida@tpgi.com. And I will put that email in the chat. If you have any questions, please add them to the chat and we will address them at the end of the session. And if you have to leave early or have colleague who would like to watch a recording of this, you will get a email with a recording of this webinar that you can watch on demand. So, without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to David.

- [David] Thank you very much, Marisa and welcome everybody to this webinar. So, today we're going to be talking about accessibility statements and in particular, trying to shift what we mean when when we think about accessibility statements, try to transition a statement into something more of an accessibility hub. And I'll explain more about what I mean by an accessibility hub. As we get through the webinar, we're gonna explore the role of an online accessibility hub in your organization's overall accessibility strategy. We're gonna look at the key audiences that are looking for accessibility information that could be provided through an accessibility statement or hub and figuring out, you know, what are those information needs? What information do we need to provide to help those audiences? And we will discuss content strategies for building and maintaining an online accessibility hub. Now I'm sure that amongst the audience, there will be, some of you will be working for organizations who may already have an online accessibility statement, or even a broader accessibility site on your website, others of you, maybe more at an early stage and may not have an accessibility page, or may have only a very basic statement. I suspect that we'll have this broad range of organizations at different stages of their accessibility journey, and hopefully this webinar will provide information that's useful for everyone, regardless of where you are in that journey and help you understand where you are at the moment regarding providing public accessibility information, and where could you be and how might you get to that desired future state? So, let's start with a definition, what is an accessibility statement? And what could it be if we thought more broadly? So, accessibility statements have been in my experience, and this I'm just thinking of the biography of me. This is the first time I'd ever been described as a web accessibility veteran, definitely feeling my age now. And I've worked in accessibility for over 20 years. And I've definitely seen for a long time websites to have an accessibility statement, a page that provides some kind of information on accessibility, conformance or whatever. So, they're not new. These are features that have been around for a long time. They have historically tended to focus on summarizing a website's accessibility level. So, some kind of statement of the accessibility of the site that hosts the accessibility statement. And in some cases they may even be legally required. So, for example, there is European Union Legislation that covers accessibility and public sector organizations. That includes requirements for providing an accessibility statement in a particular format with particular information. And we'll come back and talk more about what that legislation requires later in the webinar. Providing an accessibility statement may also have been an outcome as part of a settlement agreement relating to an alleged case of inaccessible content. So, some organizations may be providing them. Because they are legally required to, but I'm here to hopefully persuade you that providing a statement on a voluntary basis is definitely a good thing. So, when we think about the reality of accessibility statements, there are often shortcomings, in one case or one major shortcoming is an accessibility statement. That's made up of boiler plate, text that's been taken from somewhere else, and it's a very high level and very vague statement of commitment. And it really gives very little insight into what an organization is doing to advance accessibility. Another scenario might be where the accessibility statement dives into very specific technical details associated with compliance claims. And those details may be obsolete. They may be out of date. They may refer to older standards and may not reflect current reality, but they're really focusing on technical descriptions that may be hard to understand for somebody without that technical level of knowledge. And another shortcoming of accessibility statements that I see out in the wild is a statement that has either limited or no invitation for people to engage in dialogue. No way for somebody to engage with the organization, to learn more or to report accessibility issues or to seek help when they encounter problems. So, accessibility statements. When we think about statements as a very perfunctory, very basic description of accessibility, we might be missing an opportunity to really advance, a public perception of what the organization is doing, a meaningful way to publicly demonstrate an organization's commitment and progress. And that's why I encourage us all to think about an accessibility hub, some kind of online presence that goes beyond a basic statement to think more about accessibility information in a broader way. So, as a public demonstration of commitment, an accessibility hub could be considered a single page or a microsite that serves as the public face of an organization's accessibility maturity level. It's a way for people to understand where your organization sits and how it thinks about accessibility. It may well be seen as a visible demonstration of a shared commitment to accessibility or a way for the organization to recognize that accessibility is something that it embraces as a whole, rather than delegates to one specific part of the organization, whether it might be legal or IT or whoever. And so it could serve as a valuable central place for stakeholders to find the information they need to help them meet their accessibility responsibilities. It's also an opportunity to provide an open communication channel. That's focused on accessibility rather than relying on other communication channels here somewhere. That's got an accessibility focus, and by opening a dialogue with people who need accessibility information or support, you're again, showing a proactive approach to supporting people with diverse accessibility needs. It can be an opportunity to provide an account of the accessibility of your organization's products and services. So, we're not necessarily throwing out the original state, the definition of an accessibility statement. That's still valuable information to share with people and certainly something to include in a broader accessibility hub. And it could also be seen as a connection, a connection between digital and physical accessibility. So, a way for you to talk about efforts, to enhance the physical accessibility of your organization's sort of physical footprint or premises, and with other organizational efforts to advance inclusion. And again, I'll come back and talk about that in more detail later in the webinar. So, let's think about the audiences that we'd want to serve through an accessibility hub. Who are they and what kind of information are they looking for? So, primary audiences, well, I guess an obvious one would be people with abilities who are using your organization's website and other services with a fundamental question. I need to know if the organization's digital products and services are accessible to me and what to do. If I find a barrier when I'm interacting with those products and services. Another audience to consider prospective customers and employees with disabilities, who may ask, I need to see some evidence that this organization is committed to digital accessibility, is really doing something about digital accessibility, beyond talking at very high levels. We may also consider vendors as our primary audience, people who want to sell or trade with the organization to provide it with digital products, vendors may be asking, I need to know what accessibility requirements exist in the organization's procurement policy. I want to know what I need to do as a vendor to make sure that I provide what the organization needs in terms of accessibility. And another audience for information are employees of the organization who create or manage or add content to digital products and services who may need help creating accessible websites, documents, and media. So, there are a range of people who need accessibility information who could be served through an accessibility hub. Now, when we think of out a hub, we can think about it as a public facing entity and also an internal facing entity. And you may consider that some information that I'll cover through this webinar is information that you'd rather keep internally facing rather than publicly sharing with everybody, and I'll talk more about different approaches to that as we go through, but I think it's helpful to think about priority content that would need to be public facing that would need to be available to everybody through an accessibility hub. Firstly, some information about the organizations, overall commitment to digital accessibility. Secondly, some information on the accessibility of the digital products provided by the organization, including the site hosting the accessibility hub. And thirdly, the ways to contact the organization about access issues, ways to build that dialogue, to establish that communication channel. So, let's look at these three priority content areas in turn. And firstly, what do we mean when we talk about communicating commitment? Well, the accessibility hub is a place for you to provide some kind of information that helps you summarize the organization's recognition of the importance of accessibility, and what it's doing to meet those responsibilities. And this is not a place where you want to start by launching into technical details of conformance with standards or tools or technologies that you use to handle accessibility. There is a role and a place for that information, but it's not at the start of the accessibility hub. What you want is a people focused inclusive, plain language, description of your accessibility intent, your accessibility goals. What do you want to achieve and try, to avoid a sort of over promotion or reliance on a specific technology approach. Anything that might be a considered a kind of reliance on one particular technology as your accessibility solution, but communicate your approach as a broader strategy that involves a range of stakeholders across your organization emphasized that you are looking at the accessibility holistically. Another thing that I would advise is to avoid a kind of dominance of talking about accessibility in terms of what you're doing to comply with relevant legislation. Again, legislation can provide a guide as to what you should be doing regarding accessibility, but if you overemphasize the focus on compliance, then it can communicate the message that you're thinking about accessibility, mainly in terms of doing what you need to do to avoid getting into legal trouble, rather than helping users, helping people, helping potential and current customers, helping employees with disability, be successful and achieve goals. Obviously this applies to the information and organizational commitment and throughout the accessibility hub, make sure as far as possible that the hub is itself, a model of accessibility. So, whether that's in the technical design in the way that you present information or in the language that you use, make sure that the accessibility hub is demonstrating best practice as far as possible in accessibility. So, as an example, I've been looking around for some examples that might help to demonstrate some of the points made in the webinar. Here's Zoom, the technology that we're using for the webinar today. And here's, I'm showing right now a screenshot of Zoom's accessibility page, which starts with some clear statements of intent, Zoom is for everyone. Accessibility is at the heart of what we do. And then it talks briefly about some key strategies guiding the development of their digital product to ensure that as far as possible, it is accessible and inclusive, but it's starting off by focusing on people. It's including a screenshot of people with diverse, some people with disabilities taking part in a Zoom call. So, again, you early on, they're communicating a commitment through a people focused way using plain language, rather than immediately going into talking about technical compliance and other more detailed content. So, that helps us shift into thinking about how we might communicate information on a accessibility of digital products and services. So, when I talk about digital products and services that an accessibility hub might want to share some information about, they might include the organization's website itself, the host of the accessibility hub, but other digital services that the organization provides users or customers that might include any mobile apps that your organization provides kiosk based applications that customers may use in physical premises. It may consider how you use social media channels with accessibility in mind, any other digital products that your organization sells or provides. And I appreciate that I'm maybe speaking to people who work for tech companies who sell software products, who provide services through digital channels. Anything that current or perspective customers may be interacting with and may need to know about accessibility, especially accessibility, shortcomings, consider providing information about the accessibility of those digital products, on the accessibility hub. You may also want to consider providing accessibility information about physical locations that customers may access. Here we're thinking about accessibility hub, an accessibility hub as an online presence, but there's no reason not to include accessibility about your physical locations. So, you may want to include some information about what you're doing to make your physical premises more accessible and ways in which people with disabilities can access information and content in different ways. So, you don't stop at digital for think, think beyond digital and think about the physical environment that your organization provides when you consider the accessibility hub as a central location for accessibility information, then that can certainly include physical accessibility as well. So, what accessibility information might you include for a digital product? I would start firstly for people who might be affected by any barriers present in a digital product. So, people who are affected by accessibility barriers will need a plain language summary of those barriers, the location, the nature, the impact of the barriers and advice or support on overcoming those barriers. So, I am encouraging you to start by thinking about helping people who may be affected by accessibility barriers, present in a digital product. And then we can provide technical details of accessibility for conformance. And we might want to include the level of conformance with a particular standard and areas of nonconformance with that standard, the date that the product was evaluated, this is super critical to help people understand how current the accessibility information you're providing is you probably would also want to include the version of the product if it's a piece of software or an app, so that people know exactly what the conformance information is being provided about. The scope of the evaluation, making sure that you communicate what was evaluated and also the method, how did you generate this information? Did you conduct an automated scan of the product? Did you conduct a manual audit? Did you do it yourself? Did somebody else do it? You may even go as far as providing details of the audit or at least how it was put together. You may think about providing an accessibility conformance review popularly known as a VPATs provided through a voluntary product accessibility template. They can be very helpful in recognizable declarations of product accessibility. You might also think about providing links to product roadmaps or accessibility documentation, to support users, wanting to learn more about the accessibility of the digital product in question. So, think about what kind of information you have available that you could include, or direct people to when you provide accessibility information about a particular digital product. The screenshot I'm sharing on the slide just now is a model accessibility statement provided by the UK Government. This is based on the model accessibility statement provided by the European Union to help public sector organizations in Europe, meet their accessibility responsibilities. And just a definition of what could be included in an accessibility statement for those of us who aren't subject to this legislation, and a definition of what's required for those organizations who are subject to legislation in EU countries. And effectively, it kind of talks about the different required sections, the declaration of compliance, the description of non-accessible content, details of how the statement was prepared, where the information came from, information about feedback and how to get in touch with somebody to find out more, and the underlying enforcement procedure that this accessibility statement is provided under, now, again, for organizations that are not subject to EU public sector legislation, this is an interesting reference to help you figure out what kind of information you might consider adding, even if it's not necessarily a requirement for your organization to follow this. So, let's look at our third piece of high priority information, and that is providing a communication channel, and ideally multiple communication channels, to help people who need to talk to you about accessibility, do so in as an efficient and accessible way as possible. So, here we're focusing on ways for people to ask for accessibility help and to report issues that they encounter. And providing multiple ways helps you help people choose the way that's easiest for them. One approach to provide is a simple and accessible online form to a allow people to submit feedback. Another approach would be a dedicated email address that people can use to report potential issues or ask questions. And if it's something that uses a memorable email address, accessibility at organization.com that's something that demonstrates there's a dedicated email address for capturing accessibility information that might help engender trust that there is a process in place for handling this information. A phone number for people who would prefer to call and talk to somebody, maybe details of business units who are dedicated to assisting people with disabilities or providing accommodations. And another approach that I'll mention is something that TPGi recently started to offer, IT connect service, which is a way to get feedback directly from people using specific assistive technologies at the minute jaws, the jaws screen reader, this technology allows jaws users to directly provide feedback on a website accessibility, and for website providers to access and handle that feedback through TPGis arc platform. So, it's another potential channel to help people communicate accessibility feedback and ask accessibility questions. Now I'm providing examples of a number of different communication channels here. What's really important is to make sure that they're, as far as possible, there's capacity to triage escalate and respond to feedback. It's something that you'll want to consider how much capacity you have to manage. Maybe you'll need to start simple and then work up to multiple channels, depending on the capacity to be able to handle this content. You are having staffing who can respond to an piece of accessibility feedback in a knowledgeable way, or pass it on to somebody who does requires processes, requires some capacity. So, it's important to be realistic in terms of what kind of communication channels you can realistically staff and provide. But I really encourage you to provide at least one way for people to report accessibility concerns. It helps build trust. It helps create that communication channel and dialogue, which is much better than relying on kind of people, using Facebook or other sort of public ways to complain about the inaccessibility of your product. If you can open that dialogue directly, then that's going to be much more helpful for people who are affected. An example that I'm sharing just now is a webpage, from the University of Nevada, Reno. This is their accessibility assistance webpage. And it's an example of how people can provide, the multiple communication channels. There's an ask a question facility, there's a specific you're allowing people, whether it's faculty or students or other people to seek help with file accessibility, there's a report and accessibility option, a separate file, a complaint feature, and then specific information for vendors. So, multiple different communication channels, there's a telephone number. There's a specific email address for captioning or transcription support. So, they're really providing a number of different channels for different accessibility questions. So, I've covered the sort of main content areas that you ideally want to include in your accessibility hub, but there are multiple different types of content that you want to consider that help meet the needs of different audiences, seeking accessibility and information and support. And again, some of the content I'm gonna share in this section of the webinar, you might feel that you'd prefer to keep internal. It might be that for privacy or for other reasons that you feel this is more appropriately internally facing content. But I would say that the more that you publicly share, the more you demonstrate a commitment to accessibility that helps you build trust, helps you build a reputation. And you may end up being seen as an example of best practice in publicly providing accessibility information. So, certainly, I understand caution in terms of sharing some information about accessibility that may be targeted more towards an internal audience, but the more you can share publicly, the more people can engage with you and see the good work that your organization is doing to advance accessibility. So, one example, one audience we talked about earlier was people looking to engage with your organization in procurement, but you might also look at employees who have responsibility and authority to make decisions regarding purchasing or acquiring digital products and services. So, some way to provide policy and process, to follow for employees to ensure that accessibility factors into procurement process is and influences procurement decisions. That's valuable information to help people who could potentially be in impacting on the digital accessibility state of the organization through purchasing decisions and for vendors providing expectations for accessibility and your approach to partnership, to improve and maintain a digital product or services accessibility that's information that you'd want to make public, whether it's directly on the accessibility hub or easy to find from the accessibility hub. Making as easy as possible for vendors to understand your expectations for any digital product or service that you procure will help them know. And have appropriate respond to those needs as best they can. So, an example here is the University of Washington. They have a procuring accessible IT subsite of their accessibility website that provides some details of their university policy on procurement, and where includes accessibility plus additional information for vendors to learn more about how the university approaches working with vendors to ensure accessibility of third party products. Another opportunity for the accessibility statement is to promote the organization as an inclusive place to work or study by publishing an accessibility hub. That is a rich source of information that helps different audiences meet their information needs. You're already demonstrating that you have a proactive and open approach to digital accessibility. You can also kind of build on the accessibility hub to really emphasize that your organization is progressive about digital accessibility. You may want to link from the hub to wider diversity equity and inclusion efforts and encourage diversity equity and inclusion to link back to the accessibility hub so that there's a mutual link between digital accessibility and wider DEI efforts. Links to hiring process for people with disabilities. The accessibility hub could be an opportunity to demonstrate that you are open and inclusive when it comes to hiring so links through to HR or another online presence where you are seeking to hire new employees, provide information on how you support people with disabilities, looking to seek employment with your organization. Is another way to build a link between the accessibility hub and another area of the organization's digital presence that could help demonstrate inclusion. Links to case studies of employees or customers with disabilities. Again, help you demonstrate your open approach to being an inclusive place, to work an inclusive place for customers and other stakeholders to interact with. And a really good example of that is this is Procter & Gamble, people with disabilities webpage that I'm sharing where the specific information about what Procter & Gamble do to support employees with disabilities and grow their employee base of people with disabilities. And in doing so, recognizing that increasing diversity brings all sorts of other positive benefits to the workplace. The site has a, this page has a specific video of featuring an employee. Who's a leader for Deaf Culture within Procter & Gamble. So, there's a video case study and additional information about that employee and the program that they helped develop. So, it's another way to demonstrate how accessibility connects with an inclusive and welcoming workplace. Another area where the accessibility hub can help contribute is to support content providers ensuring the accessibility of their content. And again, this is another example of an area of the hub that you might feel is something that you would keep as an internal resource, but many organizations have this as a publicly facing part of their accessibility hub, guidance on helping content providers, content managers, content owners, conduct accessibility, evaluation of products, or content that they're responsible. So, guidance on accessibility evaluation might include lists of key things to check. When you review a digital resource for accessibility tools and test procedures to help you conduct that evaluation process, an advice on how to address the barriers that are identified in an evaluation of a digital product or service, you might also provide support for accessible content creation, advice, techniques for supporting people who are creating web content or documents, or video or audio, or social media, helping them step by step, introduce accessibility into the content creation and maintenance process. And another area of content that you might consider, including in the accessibility hub. Again, whether it's public facing or internal only is information relating to policy, process and governance. How is accessibility governed at the organization? This might include internal policy on accessibility or links to external technical standards or other standards that you follow, governance structure. Who's accountable for digital accessibility at the organization. Who's responsible. How is the governance structure set up so that everyone knows their role and responsibility for accessibility? How is quality overseen? What does the organization do to assure access ability over time to ensure that accessibility grows and does not degrade over time as innovations occur, as new purchases happen, as transformations happen, how do we ensure that accessibility remains a quality of the organization's digital estate? And in this section, you might want to consider reporting on plans and progress, what are your goals for advancing accessibility? How are you doing against those goals? What have you achieved so far? So, that's been a sort of high level review of the types of content that you can provide on an accessibility hub. Let's now talk about a strategy for building that hub for building that online and accessibility presence. And again, I'll pause to recognize that people attending this webinar are likely to be in very different scenarios depending on your organization, depending on how big it is, depending on what capacity it has to handle accessibility, where it is in accessibility journey. And thinking about all of these different content opportunities you might wonder, well, how are we going to do this? Given our particular circumstances and limitations. So, having a strategy for build building that accessibility presence is really important. So, let's think about some key priorities for building and maintaining a quality accessibility hub. Firstly, you want to make sure that the accessibility hub reflects your current efforts and the support that you offer. Secondly, you want to make sure that it's easy to find that the information that you provide, however, extensive it is, is easy to locate by the people who need that information. You want to make sure that the content within the hub is easy to find and follow for target audiences, and you want to consider what content you'll need to create from scratch, what content has to be generated, and what content may already exist and can be linked to from the hub, rather than repeating information that's available elsewhere. And you'll want to have a plan for managing the content of the accessibility hub over time. So, firstly, let's think about how we reflect current effort and support. Your public accessibility presence really should reflect where you are in accessibility, maturity, and indicate where you want to head. So, in terms of prioritizing content, as we said before, it's really focusing on firstly, demonstrating your commitment to accessibility. Secondly, providing that communication channel to help people, to talk to you about their needs, seek help, and as your efforts and your capacity grow. You can reflect this in the breadth and the depth of the content you provide. It's really important that your accessibility hub doesn't over promise or doesn't sort of make assertions about accessibility achievements that you can't back up with evidence. You don't want to create an unnecessarily optimistic indication of your current level of accessibility, but don't hide what you offer. Don't hide what you've achieved, you be realistic in reflecting where you are at the minute and where you'd like to head in terms of your accessibility journey. Secondly, let's think about ways in which we can make the hub easy to find. Well, one way to do this is to choose URL, a link that it communicates the accessibility hubs importance in terms of the organization's strategy. So, one way you could do that is to create a URL for the accessibility page or hub, homepage is something like organization.com/accessibility or accessibility.organization.com. It's just a simple way to say, hmm, accessibility is a really high level requirement. And it's also something that's a shared responsibility rather than having it as a sub domain of IT or compliance or some other organization. You're not saying that accessibility is the ownership of one particular business unit or a part of the organization that it's something that's high level, and it's a shared responsibility. And it's defining what the URL is, is a really effective way of doing that. Linked to the hub from a consistent place on other site pages, accessibility as link text is simple and effective. It's been around for long enough that I think it's probably, without having evidence to present to you. I think it's probably fairly well recognized that the accessibility link on a webpage is going to take you to information about digital accessibility, rather than any other definition of accessibility that people might come up with. One thing I would encourage you to do is to work hard, to try and get that link into the header of a page rather than the footer. When we think about accessibility, the footer is generally not the easiest place or the quickest place to locate a link to give in people information about accessibility. So, something prominent and quick to find for people who need that information. A good way to do that is to put the link in the header. Then you'll want to link to the hub from other key web and non web location. So, linking to it from other, organizations or online presences that support diversity and inclusion support, technical excellence. You may want to link to it from product pages, for example, link to it from human resources, from your diversity equity and inclusion site. If you have one, link to it also from non web applications. So, if you have brochures, literature about accessibility or inclusion, including a link to the ability hub helps direct people to your online presence. That helps people learn more about what you're doing to support accessibility. Make content easy to find and follow. One important thing to consider is that accessibility information maybe information being that that's being presented to people who are reluctant to engage with that information or stressed or upset, especially when you consider, somebody who's unable to use a product for, because of an accessibility barrier. People might not necessarily be in the best, frame of mind to decipher complex convoluted content. So, making sure that content is well organized and targeted at the target audience, provide multiple ways to locate that content for a specific audience or purpose, helps reduce the burden of finding that information. Clearly distinguishing content that's targeted towards content creators and content that's intended for people who encounter accessibility barriers, help avoid confusion. You know, again if you are somebody who's looking to report a barrier and you follow an accessibility link and it's providing information to help people create accessible content, that's not going to be so helpful for you. So, focusing on a writing style that encourages rather than intimidates will help people, especially if you're reaching out to content managers or authors who you're encouraging to meet their responsibilities, to provide accessible content, being supportive rather than presenting accessibility as a very significant challenge that's something that may seem to be overwhelming and unachievable prioritizing essential guidance, helps people focus on doing something to make a positive difference. And one additional thing that you could do to help encourage people is to celebrate achievements, help build a community of practice within your organization, where you have made significant progress in terms of providing more accessible digital content and services, you know, focus on achievements. And that can help encourage others who may otherwise have felt that accessibility is something that's too difficult and too complex for them to be able to take on. Next step, consider what content to write and what content to link to. So, you want to focus on prioritizing creating unique content that reflects your current state and the support that your organization offers. So, the content that you'll need to write for the accessibility hub really is the content that focuses specifically on your organization. So, that might be it's high level commitment, the communication channels, and the people that support accessibility dialogue and communication, accessibility information about your digital products and resources. This is information that you or your coworkers will need to create, information about policy and processes. If you choose to publish that, is a unique content to your organization. But there may be a lot of other relevant accessibility information that already exists. So, you may be able to link to, for example, procurement support in another part of your organization's website, you may be able to link through to pages on the human resources area of your website. That include advice for prospective employees with disabilities or hiring strategy or current positions or whatever it may be, maybe that you can also link to other parts of your site that provide support for building accessible content. So, this is all content that's already there, and your hub can serve as almost a directory of information, rather than repeating information that already exists. You'll also want to have a plan for managing the accessibility hubs content over time, and to do that you want to identify well, what content is most likely to change over time? Which content in our accessibility hub are we going to need to monitor to make sure it's current and it's accurate? Well, specifically you want to look at changes in accessibility of any digital resource that you're reporting on in terms of accessibility. If you've have digital products that you sell, make sure that you check in with a product owner to reflect any changes in accessibility of updated or new releases of that digital product, any changes to the host website that you can reflect on, especially when you've taken steps to improve accessibility, then you should update the accessibility hub to reflect those changes. You may want to report and updates to organizational progress towards achieving its accessibility goals. You may want to mention any new or updated services or tools or policies or processes that the organization has put in place to support accessibility as it grows. It may be that you've appointed somebody to an accessibility, a specialist position announcing that as a piece of news could be a good piece of updated information to share. And you may discover some helpful external resources that you could link to from the accessibility hub. That would be new content to add. Blog posts or events that your organization hosts, maybe sponsorship sort of initiatives that your organization has undertaken to help demonstrate its commitment to digital accessibility. These are all pieces of content that may change, that you may want to start adding to the accessibility hub. So, having a plan for figuring out how you identify and monitor those changes, maybe allocating specific employee to be responsible for particular pieces of content on the accessibility hub will help you manage that as best as possible and reduce the chances that your hub does not accurately reflect current state. So, that's pretty much all I have for today, in terms of managing or encouraging you to develop an accessibility hub. In summary, an accessibility statement the potential to become a hub, a trusted public expression of your organization's commitment to accessibility. It can help you advance digital accessibility in a sustainable way, through enabling communication, through providing guidance and support and on reporting progress and helping organizations with their digital accessibility strategy, their digital accessibility communication efforts is something that, I, as a consultant love to do. And we'd love to talk to anyone who would like to explore this topic in more detail and in particularly how the accessibility hub, the online public facing presence of your accessibility efforts can help you with your accessibility goals. I'm gonna leave you with a few links to very helpful resources that give you some more information about accessibility statements and how you can help, including the Model Accessibility Statement provided by Government of UK, an article by disability, in on digital accessibility statement, best practices, MicroAssist cover an enormous collection of accessibility statements that's regularly updated. So, that link will lead to a page with hundreds of links, to other organization accessibility statements, which can serve as a useful reference point for the breadths and depth of accessibility statements that are out there. The Law Office of Lainey Feingold has a helpful article on accessibility statements. That's also regularly updated. And the W3C have provided a tool that helps you generate an accessibility statement. It's an online form that asks you a number of different questions about the digital product that you are seeking to provide an accessibility statement for. And you can enter that content and will generate a text that you can then copy and paste and use as a digital accessibility statement. And all of these links will be available in the slide deck that will be available to all attendees after this webinar. So, thank you very much and good luck with your efforts in building and providing an accessibility hub for your organization.

- [Marisa] Thank you so much, David. That was wonderful. It looks like we do have one question. It says, do you ever find that organizations are using such statements as a way out of providing accessibility as a false statement, quote, oh, we're doing what we can for existing prerecorded audio and video on the site may not include captions. We do not plan to add captions to these recordings because they're exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations, which seems pretty dishonest or disingenuous?

- You know, I mean, I recognize this scenario and I think it is important not to see that the accessibility statement or hub is an alternative to doing the work. I think communicating the current state is all well and good. And it's important to be realistic to say here's where we are at the minute, here are these things that are, that we have not yet been able to ensure are accessible, but if that statement doesn't change over time, if that situation doesn't change over time, then I think that that organization, could find itself in bother if people see no progress and no convincing reason for the lack of progress, then that accessibility statement could end up being counterproductive for the organization. So, yeah the scenario, and I can't think of a specific example, but I think that, that scenario certainly could be something that's recognized, and I think it is important not to see the accessibility statement as a one off that never changes. And that means that whatever the accessibility statement says, that's it? That you don't have to do anything more.

- [Marisa] So, David, we have a few other questions we are running out of time. So, I think we have time for one more. And then I will give these questions to David and he can answer them directly through email for whoever's question does not get answered. So, please, I will find your email in Zoom, or you can email me directly at ida@tpgi.com that is in the chat. If you do not get your question answered. So, we have apologies if you address this already, but how often would you suggest accessibility statements slash hubs speak updated doing so only when we get updates, for example, seems too slow, but doing it every time your site is new content or you get new audit findings seems hard to sustain.

- [David] It is a good question. And it partly depends on the available resources that you have to maintain the accessibility statement or hub. And certainly if the hub is reporting on the accessibility of a digital product and it's been updated and there are significant improvements or drops an accessibility, I would say it's important to reflect those in the information provided in the hub. I mean, what we want to avoid is being overly positive about accessibility. If something's gone wrong, being realistic and providing help to people who are effect, but also where the accessibility had previously communicated that a situation was suboptimal and it's been addressed, then share that good news. You know I think there's a, I wouldn't necessarily say that it's something that has to be constantly updated, it might help you decide what kind of content, what level of detail of content to provide. And it's certainly gonna be impractical to constantly be reflecting on the accessibility state of every single page or screen of digital content that your organization owns. Especially if your organization is a very large organization, but trying to provide a realistic state of assessment of current state. And obviously providing that communication channel to say, if you encounter any situation, that's contrary to the information you read here, please let us know and we'll do our best to help you. So, having that communication channel helps you handle situations where your accessibility hub may have information that's somehow going out to sync with the current state.

- [Marisa] Okay, well, we are just about out of time, anonymous attendee has asked a question about how would you success the accessibility statement, address tools that are various states of accessibility? We are out of time, and I don't know who you are. So, if you would still like your question answered, please email me at ida, I-D-A@tpgi.com, and David, if there is nothing else, then I think we can end this webinar. Thank you again, everybody who attended and you will get a recording or a link to the recording of this webinar. And if you would like a copy of the deck, please email me. Thanks again, and have a wonderful day.

- [David] Thank you so much Sharon. Thank you.

- [Marisa] Bye.