Q&A: Making Accessibility Happen: From Accessibility Maturity to Meeting the ISO 30071-1 International Standard

Watch this presentation in the Knowbility Learning Center

Accessibility is becoming more and more important to organizations worldwide, due to increased legal cases and brand focus on diversity and inclusion. Accessibility teams are being created everywhere. But with this increased investment of more time and resources to improve and embed accessibility, it’s essential that organizations do this in an effective and efficient way.

Accessibility Maturity Models help organizations to do that, by informing their strategic plans for their accessibility journeys and providing mechanisms to check far they have come.

A number of maturity models have been proposed and used over the last 5 years. These are often based on the experiences of individuals in large companies, the experience of accessibility companies working for multiple clients in particular countries, or based on existing Capability Maturity Models like Carnegie Mellon’s. These have started many organizations on their accessibility journey but often have been found lacking to get them to where they want to be.

Jonathan Hassell led the creation of the International Standard for accessibility maturity, ISO 30071-1, to solve this problem, and to make sure the Standard, which was launched in 2019, was fully appropriate for use globally, so organizations and the digital vendors they often use to deliver their digital services have a common model to use.

Governments in some countries are already requiring digital and marketing agencies to comply with the Standard to be allowed onto procurement frameworks to provide communications services. Jonathan’s company, Hassell Inclusion, is helping many of those agencies, and many companies in the healthcare, banking, and retail sectors, to progress on their journey to become more mature and work towards compliance with the Standard.

This session will compare the Accessibility Maturity Models which are in use, looking at their strengths and weaknesses. We’ll look at how they need to be scaled to look at all the jobs that accessibility impacts for an organization to mature, how you can assess your organization against them (for free, in the case of the Digital Accessibility Maturity Scorecard), and how they can be used to drive your organization’s ongoing accessibility roadmap and plans.