E33: Insights from the Fifth Annual State of Digital Accessibility Report

In this IAAP United in Accessibility podcast episode Timothy Springer, founder and CEO of Level Access, is discussing key insights from the 5th State of Digital Accessibility Report. Tim highlights trends showing organizations are moving from awareness to action on digital accessibility, incorporating it into product lifecycles, and having centralized programs for effective implementation.

Transcript

00:03 Speaker  

Welcome to the United in Accessibility podcast where we delve into the realms of accessibility, innovation and leadership. In today's episode, we are honored to host Timothy Springer, founder and CEO of Level Access. Tim has shaped cutting edge technologies redefining digital accessibility, notably playing a key role in developing and focusing the industry's first commercial software for web accessibility testing. His expertise extends to the accessibility management platform and the creation of the document compliance query language, advising major organizations like the Social Security Administration, HP and Wells Fargo Tim's leadership steered Level Access through challenges resulting in remarkable growth. In this episode, we speak about the insights from the fifth State Of Digital Accessibility Report, a collaborative project with G3ict, IAAP and Vanson Bourne. Join us as we shed light on the ever-evolving landscape of digital accessibility on the United in Accessibility podcast.

01:11 Christopher Michael Lee  

Welcome to the IAAP United in Accessibility podcast. Today we are joined by Timothy or Tim Springer founder and CEO of Level Access, who will help us navigate key insight from the latest State Of Digital Accessibility Report called SODAR. Welcome Tim, how are you doing? 

01:30 Timothy Springer  

What's up? I'm good. How are you, Christopher? What's happening?

01:35 Christopher Michael Lee  

I'm doing well. Sunny weather outside. But it's going great. I love it. 

01:40 Timothy Springer  

Sunny weather here. It's amazing. Life is good. 

01:43 Christopher Michael Lee  

Now, where are you at right now? 

01:45 Timothy Springer  

Southern California. So, we moved down to Newport Beach from DC about a year and a half ago. 

01:51 Christopher Michael Lee  

All right. All right. So, this is the fifth report. Correct? 

01:55 Timothy Springer  

Yeah. 

01:56 Christopher Michael Lee  

And it's in collaboration with G3ict and IAAP. We've been working together now for five years on this. Some great data is coming out of it was starting to see some trends.

02:04 Timothy Springer  

100% Yeah. It's very interesting, because you see it now over the course of multiple different years and so you can really analyze things and understand the changes year over year, but also the long-term trends. 

02:17 Christopher Michael Lee  

Nice. Well, most people know you, but why don't you do just start off by introducing yourself, tell us a little bit about your background and the kind of your journey towards accessibility. 

02:27 Timothy Springer  

Yeah, so I've been working in the digital space, like websites for almost 30 years at this point, I actually started building websites, air quotes professionally when I was in high school way back in the mid-90s, in the era of like Netscape 1.0. So it was like very, very early web developers, what you would call it these days. At that point, it was, you know, random person tinkering with HTML code and pressing reload in a browser to see what happened. So, I'm a computer science guy, I went to Stanford computer science, I dropped out to start a company midway through my junior year, that company was then called SSP Technologies, which then became SSP Bark group, which thank God eventually became Level Access, which is a much better name for a company. But I've been an early sort of proponent of and believer in digital accessibility. I've worked in this space at this point for just about 25 years. And while that was probably 10 years too early to market, we really started working in accessibility before it got to be mainstream, which where it is now, it did give us the ability to build up a lot of solidity in the company, and really figure out how to run a company, and then also build a lot of domain expertise. So, I'm want to there's a, there's a couple other folks in this space, but I'm one of the one of the CEOs in the space that has a lot of domain expertise. And that comes from us being sort of a deep in the weed’s consultant in this for a long time. And so, what's neat in that period of time is, you know, we've seen the market sort of catch up to what we thought was potential for accessibility. And my point of view is that's really coalesced to push digital accessibility into the mainstream. And that's ultimately what you see in SODAR. What we see in the market is we've got these, you know, massive forces that are now pushing accessibility to be a core part of any enterprise's digital compliance programs. And it allows these organizations to do something that they are inclined to do in my experience, which is truly trying to make the technology that they build accessible to everyone and available to everyone. 

04:37 Christopher Michael Lee  

So over 25 years, that's a long time. Right? What are some of the major changes that you've seen or maybe one change that you've seen that just you didn't expect or that you have expected? In regard to digital accessibility primarily around I guess, you know, what companies are doing or not doing? 

04:58 Timothy Springer  

Yeah, I think that the narrative around digital accessibility has really shifted. The days when organizations looked at this and said, hey, this is a one-time code problem, they're still somewhat present in the lower end of the market for smaller organizations. But most organizations with any degree of size understand electronics is a question of how we do business. And it's also a question of more than compliance. It's really about who do we want to be as an organization and that evolution, you know, we've got hard data on it. Now going back to 2019, report, the State Of Digital Accessibility Report. And then this year, we've gotten a lot more in depth on that as well with interviews across, you know, 1000 professionals and 500, senior managers. But really, what we've seen for the evolution of accessibility is it's gone from I don't have to do this to I have to do it, because a law requires me to do it, to where it really is now, which is, yeah, I get their legal compliance components of this, but ultimately, we want to do this in a way that is impactful to users and good for the people that are our stakeholders, be the employees be the customers, be they just brought our members of the community. And so ultimately, where this will land, and I think you see this evolution quite well as ultimately, this is about users, and users making good choices and having access to different technologies. And then the compliance component you get for free with it.

06:30 Christopher Michael Lee  

Interesting. So, what's the difference? Is there a difference between this year's data collecting that was done versus last year or the previous four years? 

06:40 Timothy Springer  

Yeah, so previous four years, we just did a survey technique. So basically, put together a survey, we sent it out to a bunch of accessibility professionals or folks that were stakeholders in the accessibility process combat data, what you don't get in that is more in-depth vignette about what's happening, as well as some of the more subtle contacts you get from surveys. So, for this year, we added in about 1000 surveys, and it's split broadly between Practitioners about 500, and Senior managers and Executives and 500, as well. And what that does is it gets you a really good insight into not just what does the data says, but thematically what do you hear about from folks. And the key themes that we got back in that: One is things are moving from sort of awareness to action. So, it used to be that you had to spend a lot of time just informing people in organizations around what the heck digital accessibility was, people had no idea what this was. And if you would tell them, we're going to make our site accessible to people with disabilities, the immediate question would be like, people with disabilities use our website, that doesn't happen now. Organizations are generally aware of this; they have gone to the level of formalizing a policy and met so that 72% of the respondents had a policy in place by organization count. And really what they're struggling with is, how do I do this in an effective fashion? How do I do this, so it's sustainable, and it's cost effective. And so that's pretty clear. The second thing is you've got a movement beyond compliance. And so foundationally, and why many organizations start in digital accessibility is in response to litigation or market forces litigation, I've either been sued, or I have the threat of a lawsuit market forces to be able to sell my product, it needs to be accessible. And so that's the starting line. Most organizations though, as they go into accessibility move beyond that. And really, as they start to develop, they're like, Look, our objective is to make the thing we offer more usable for everyone and ensure everyone has a good experience. And we will get legal compliance or go to market compliance with that ability to sell our product. The third thing we see is the incorporation of accessibility as a really key theme that's come out of that, there is a resounding agreement that the best way to create a lasting program and digital accessibility is to put this into your lifecycle. That could be your product lifecycle, your software development lifecycle, your content development lifecycle, but the way you do business has accessibility built in. And very clearly, you get that signal as well, both from the data and then the qualitative comments from everyone. Hey, we know we have to do this. We know this is a long term change in the way we do business. Really what we want to know is how to most effectively integrate it but not the precursor question of should we integrate it at all. Everybody kind of assumes that at this point. And then the final one is programs having a program around this that's important, you're way more likely to succeed if you have some degree of centralization in your program, and we can talk about what that is, and a cohesive and consistent implementation for this across the organization aspect. And really, you don't get the impact you want unless you have a centralized program. So, if you have a central program, you're way more likely to say this has had a positive impact on your business than if you don't have a centralized program. And it's not shocking, right? It's just you have people or a group that are responsible for this and then coordinating efforts and collecting data on the efficacy of those efforts. And, you know, not surprisingly, that makes them more likely to succeed here.  100%. So basically, the winning program, or the winning model for an accessibility program is something like this, I have a small central group that coordinates our policy, they coordinate our training, they serve as domain experts in accessibility and then there's some degree of reporting associated with that. But the responsibility for implementing accessibility that lives with the organizational components that actually own the thing you're making accessible. So, if you have a website, and it's owned by marketing, marketing is ultimately responsible for making the website accessible, but you'll have an accessibility group. And again, it could be a person or a small team and not be very large, who says, Okay, for our website, accessibility means WCAG 2.2, AA compliance, it means we're going to allow, have a degree of testing and validation with users with disabilities, it means we can effectively ingest and respond to tickets that come up from the website, and there's other stuff that's in there as well. So, you think of these groups as having a relatively narrow remit, where they're saying, here's how we're going to do it as an organization, rather than the accessibility group is big, and does testing for everyone in the organization, technical consulting for all the parts and parts of the organization, etc. So that's the first thing if you have a central group, but it tends to be relatively narrow in scope, and it basically focused on how we do this. Your question on training, then, is, well, where does training go? Typically, the definition of what is mandated training, and how do we deliver that training through whatever training model we have, as an organization fits with that central group. And they utilize a third-party vendor like us, that basically has a corpus of training that you can readily deploy, you can deploy it into your LMS, you can then track completion of it, and you tend to customize the introduction courses, so they're specific to the organization. And then a lot of the supporting courses are relatively stock across the enterprise as well. But there's got to be somebody that's responsible for training across the enterprise. And that's inclusive of your internal resources, the employees that are on your team, who would also tell you, you should be inclusive of your external resources, particularly vendors that are doing work for you. 

10:16 Christopher Michael Lee  

Yeah. So that's interesting. I think with the IAAP members we deal with; we always see, do we centralize? Do we decentralize? How do we actually set up our organization as a whole? Regarding our internal expertise around accessibility, right? And then how do we bring the vendors in to actually support that condition? So can you talk a little bit more just about that decentralization aspect, and particularly, did we see anything in the report that dealing with training employees, because you can have some, you know, a great skeleton for an organization where you centralize it and decentralize it, if you don't have the employees that know, have the knowledge and most importantly, the skill to actually implement the work with his products or services or so on that could fall flat, correct? Now, it makes sense a lot. So, it's definitely that centralized aspect is so important, and linking into the organization's professional education, you know, it will be an important part of this for success, it sounds like.

13:19 Timothy Springer  

Yeah, and we talked a lot about this concept of shift left and accessibility. And it's a general concept. Just think about that concept as applied to your training. Basically, what shift left is saying is we want to incorporate accessibility into the process as early as possible. And we want accessibility to part of the way you do business. Well, your business also has a way that you do training. So don't invent an entirely new paradigm, just take the paradigm that you already have for training and add in some accessibility training into and again, with Federation of the various different training systems, it's very easy to do with a vendor like us and some of the other vendors on the market. 

13:53 Christopher Michael Lee  

So it's similar to I guess, you're talking only about the lifecycle, and build it into whether it's products or applications or whatever it may be, you have the accessibility built into that same thing, take the model that you have for professional education, and you don't change anything you just kind of incorporated in, it makes a lot of sense. 

14:10 Timothy Springer  

100%. And a good way to fail at your accessibility program is to try to create entirely new processes just specific to accessibility. Like they won't get adopted. They're a nightmare to maintain, they are really expensive, so it's like leverage what you have in place, and then just add accessibility in a thoughtful fashion into that. 

14:27 Christopher Michael Lee  

So can you talk a little bit about what you saw in the report regarding how it is top down that you're seeing more and more happening within these organization and a lot of our members we're seeing a lot of middle management, trying to push the top to change the organization structure around accessibility. Any thoughts around top down or middle management up?

14:47 Timothy Springer  

I mean the answer is it ends up being a touch of both right? And so, you both want to have general buy in to the accessibility program and an intelligent spot for In the organization, what you also want to have is have, you know, competent folks that are managing at the low level. One of the things that you see across organization is there is a split between how practitioners think we're doing and how managers think we're doing. And so, what happens is, if you go ask practitioners how we're doing, they say, we're okay, but we could do some work. If you ask the managers how we're doing. They're like, oh, crushing it, we're doing super good. And then the inverse actually applies to lawsuits. If you actually ask managers how we're doing, they're like, oh, it's really likely, we're still going to get sued in spite of the work that we're doing. And if you have practitioners that are not like we could totally defend a lawsuit. So, my point there is, it's less is the pushing coming from the bottom up or from the top down, it's more that there isn't alignment in the organization, in terms of how are we going to do this? How much is it going to take? What's the level of effort associated with and what are reasonable outcomes. And so, spending a lot of time on that, that's what we see is the biggest current disconnect in accessibility. And so, our sort of thesis on that and approach is, look, you got to get aligned on what we're doing and accessibility, the program, the scope of it, etc. And then what you have to do is get aligned on what are the resources for that? How much money are we going to spend on this? How much time and effort are we going to spend on that, and then you probably have to have a system in place as well to do that. So, you got to be able to get consistent data on how the program is performing, pull it out from a system like platform, which is what we sell amp, which is what we've sold historically, into the market, and be able to report on the progress of accessibility. And that makes it a quantitative measure that you can look at rather than a qualitative measure of yeah, we're doing a good job, we're doing a bad job.

16:14 Speaker  

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17:27 Christopher Michael Lee  

So just kind of, you know, drawing back a little bit, you talked a little bit about implementation and the importance of implementation, you know, you have the policy, high numbers, it looks like from the report, you said 72%, I believe, have some sort of policy in place, that something needs to be done. I think the challenges are from what I'm hearing from you, strategically, what you just kind of talked about, but also just implementation throughout the whole organization. What did we learn from the report regarding implementation?

17:53 Timothy Springer  

Probably the biggest thing you have on the implementation front really comes down to sort of the challenges associated with that. And so, to get in, really, it comes down to do you have the resources to do this effectively. Just to give you a little framing on this. What's happening in the market is organizations that have been doing accessibility for a while quickly evolved from, hey, we're doing this just because the law tells us to do it too, we're doing this because it is the kind of organization we want to be. We want to deliver good user experiences to everyone and that is aligned with what we want to do from a DNI perspective, and what we want to do just fundamentally as an organization, so the first thing you do if you have that shift and people have shifted into this mode of Yeah, I know, we have legal compliance requirements we got to fit but really, we want to ultimately deliver a good experience for everyone. Then the question becomes, do you have the right resources available to it? So, it's easy to say I want to do accessibility, it's difficult to actually fund it and get the time in it. And so, the vast majority of respondents, their organization can be doing more to address accessibility. It's literally like 89% of the respondents. So, nine out of 10 people are like, there's more stuff we could do. And what that tells you as the organizations understand the value of accessibility, because they care about it, and they don't think it's resourced properly, but there's room for improvement in that approach. And so, then you dig down from there and you say, okay, well, if you talk to teams, what is actually limiting their progress in doing this, the number one thing is competing priorities and demands for time. So, 75% of people say I've got a bunch of other stuff to do, and accessibility slips because of that. And that is particularly a dominant theme, the smaller the organization is, but if you look at organizations as an example, between 100 and 3000 employees, 85% of them say competing demands are drowning out accessibility. And if you get bigger, it's less because you have obviously some more resources and more capacity. The fact that digital accessibility is perceived as competing with these other organizational priorities to me that suggests, okay, you got to have tools, processes, and you have to have this baked into a system, such that it's not that this is a discrete priority. It's just a part of how we build software. So, it becomes less of a do I work on this or not, it's well, this is I have to do this, because it's a just how we do things here at an organization, qualitatively, that's very much what we see in the successful organizations we look up. So that's one getting clarity on the competing priorities and to me that prescription for that is really baking it into the process. So, there's just part of the way organizations do it. The second, I think, a big thing to work on in terms of getting this implemented well is really connecting people to users and user outcomes and moving them from a compliance mindset. 68% of the respondents that called 70%, right, seven in 10, are dissatisfied with the extent to which their organizations think about the needs of people with disabilities in the context of their digital experiences. And so, you have confidence and accessibility, that's high. But you also have a really high mark, where people are like, Dude, we really don't think about user needs as much in this. And the point is that the user needs are the things that are emotionally resonant in all of us. No one is going to have an emotional engagement with oh, the law says I have to go do this, that's if I make a case for compliance, you're going to give me the bare minimum, but if I can really connect you with a user that is positively impacted by what you do here, that will trigger you to give me the incremental effort and again, isn't emotionally resonant and why we're doing this, like, that's actually why most people in accessibility do what they do. The other thing is, then you do have this sort of user experience, kind of approach and messaging and component that goes into that. And so, if you kind of look at why organization to do accessibility, right, some think of it as an ethical imperative, some legal imperative, etc. there's a bunch of reasons you could do this. But really, clearly, the data says, we sustained doing this, and I am personally motivated based on how this impacts people's lives. And to me, that's the signal in the noise. It's like, if you want to sustain a program and get the resources, you got to really get the message tight around. Look, this is about doing right for all of our users. There's a class of our users that has a particular need set, but if we do it right for them, it's going to help everybody have a better, more usable experience. And that also has the benefit of being true, which is nice in terms of selling the story. So, it's probably answers a little bit around the map. But given you sort of the point of view on that.

22:52 Christopher Michael Lee  

Yeah, I mean, that's really interesting. And I liked how you kind of framed everything out in those points made it very clear. So, as you're reading through the report this year, didn't really surprise you was something that was that you were like, Ah, I disagree, or was it pretty much what you expected?

23:10 Timothy Springer  

I think what I found most interesting was that 85% of the respondents consider this a competitive advantage. That to me is new. And that goes beyond that if you were to think of sort of the evolution of some of the feelings on this, right? Stage one is compliance and reactive, I have to do this stage two as this is good for users. Stage three is actually a that's actually good for our business. It's not just that this is good for the user, this actually has a positive impact on our business. And you had pretty consistent responses across industries, you had more people in B2B. So organizations that were producing technology and selling it said it was a competitive advantage than in B2C, but both for like at 80% and above our respondents. And so that was really interesting that people are actually at the point where they're not even just saying this is ethically a thing to do and making an ethical argument. They're actually making very specific business improvement arguments. And if you look at the five top reported improvements, it's all really critical stuff. So, like 87% of people said, this will make our user experience better. That's a big number, 81% said it will make our customers happier. So, four out of five said it improves user experience and improves customer sad and brand reputation was like 79%. So also, basically four to five like it better. And then it also has impacts on the go to market cycle for these. So, customer acquisition, seven out of ten people said that's improved as part of implementing accessibility. And then customer retention was 68%. So, about the same number, about seven out of ten saying hey, it helps us retain customers. So, if you think about that, it's like four out of five people are saying it makes the user experience better and reflects positively on us as an organization and we're very confident about that. And then seven out of ten are saying, and it helps us get new customers and helps us keep customers. And if you think about that, those are all profoundly impactful levers for a private sector business and then you can apply sort of the same logic to the public sector or nonprofit sectors as well, which obviously, some appropriate changes.

25:25 Christopher Michael Lee  

It's one of the things that, you know, you want to be able to get this out, right, I mean, you know, the, the actual number of people that take the survey is much larger than last time, organization wise, and so on. So how do we do that? I mean, how do we put this in front of decision makers to show these types of trends? What's kind of the next step on this? 

25:44 Timothy Springer  

Well, if you follow through my thesis and the data, the data says this, that centralized programs perform better than decentralized programs. And this is not massive centralization. And again, it's a pretty narrow remit for that program, but somebody's got to own this. As part of building that central program. Ultimately, there's two chunks of data you got to make your case on. One is benchmarking data, which is what you have and SODAR. So, you start with here is what other organizations like us are doing both on an average across all organizations and then we'll do some slices in the future of different verticals as well. So, you can see our sectors have gated resources to accessibility as well. That's the first chunk of thing if you make a case on it, here's what other organizations like us do. And that gets into just very deep-seated emotional logic for an executive, which is somebody else is doing better than us, or we're better than someone else. Both of those two things are great motivators for organizations. And it also gives executives air cover to say why we're spending money on this, it's not just us deciding to spend money on accessibility is actually consistent throughout the market that we operate in and if we don't do this, there's a problem here. And it will ultimately impact our competitors. That's category one. Category two is then have having really good operating data on how the program is faring. And so, we do that under the governance module, we call it a programming governance module that we have in platform where we basically suck in data from all the different things you're doing on accessibility from how your production assets are faring how you’re in development assets are faring how you're doing in terms of assessments, formal assessments with us informal assessments, etc. You take all that data, and then you look at it to say, hey, we've got all this stuff, here's how our portfolio is doing. And then based on how our portfolio is faring and the value of the different assets through our strategy to go out there. So, you got I've digital properties between websites, and mobile apps and Customer Success sites and public sites, etc. Like, you got a bunch of different digital stuff that you maintain. And so, you want to figure out in the stuff you maintain, where is it currently, where should it be, and then tailor your approach to each of those things, so that it's reasonable from an economic perspective for it. So that's the second category of stuff you want to do is you want to have highly data driven decisions based on the current state of the stuff that you have and the progress of your program and use that to justify the approach that you're going to go for. 

28:08 Christopher Michael Lee  

Great, thank you for that. So, we're going to wrap this up. This has been really interesting. Is there anything that you want to share in addition that we haven't hit on?

28:14 Timothy Springer  

Yeah, I mean, my final thoughts, key takeaways. I think one thing is digital accessibility really is in the mainstream, and you're very clearly seeing it, you see it these days being a widespread priority, right. 72% of the respondents, as we mentioned before, have a policy of 85%, that gets a competitive advantage. So, it's here and here to stay. And I would say particularly for large organizations, this is a well-known issue, nobody is surprised by it anymore, you still get some surprises, little bit mid-market, and very much smaller organization, but really, anybody that's informed about digital at this point, gets that this is the thing, and you have to do it. So you don't have to work on awareness, what you got to really work on is, here's how we're going to go tackle this and what you see and how we're going to tackle it is you do see misalignment between executives and practitioners, you do see misalignment in terms of the perceived levels of legal risk and our ability to articulate compliance versus different organizational components. And then you also see these differences in terms of the resources needed. So really, it's spent a lot of time getting on the same page with your senior leaders and budget holders about how are we tackling this? What does it take to do and then, as I mentioned before, track the performance, both against industry benchmarks, and then your internal data as well. Biggest threat to your accessibility program, competing demands, right, so other stuff that people get pulled into to do. And the core prescription we would give you for that is why you got to bake it into the process because this can't be optional. It just has to be part of how you do it. And it's not different from anything else. Security is not optional. Privacy is not optional. Accessibility is not optional, either, but it is thoughtfully baked into the process to be efficient, to be able to implement. And I would say the final point is, you know, to be successful in this, somebody's got to own it. And that doesn't mean they have a huge organization, it can be a single accessibility expert, it can be a small team. And in fact, that's the model is there as someone that just is coordinating your approach to this, the finds a policy, gets the training in place, gets the tools in place does serve as an internal accessibility expert, or escalations and resolving things with stakeholders outside of the organization, but ultimately, is an enabling force for the folks that own the digital assets to then be able to go and implement it. So as a big takeaway, I think the only thing I tell you just like, this is all like really good news from my perspective, right? Having been here for 25 years, this is a radically different discussion than we were having even five years ago in accessibility. So, to me, the future here is very bright. We're constantly seeing more and better accessibility implementations, more mature programs, and more sustainability, if you will, in the programs. So, I would tell you be pretty optimistic about the future of accessibility. We're getting off to the we're getting to the right pacing and cadence here. 

31:12 Christopher Michael Lee  

That's awesome. Hi, I'm just curious, though, either you talked earlier about the 85% now companies are seeing this as competitive, right? Did the four years ago when we were putting this all-together Level Access, G3ict, Was that question in there? Because I'm kind of racking my brain as you're talking. Where was it at if it was? 

31:33 Timothy Springer  

I don't think we have benchmark data on that question from prior ones. I could tell you follow up natively, like, five years ago, it would have been zero, probably not right, some smaller number, but people fundamentally did not think about it this way. And the data that to me is consistent with that is the benefits that you get out of this have gone from being dominantly legal compliance benefits that we have data for that's consistent. It used to be you said, hey, what do you want to get out your program, it's like, I don't want to get sued. That's it. Like, and, and now it's, I truly want to deliver good experiences for everyone. And we have seen that constantly tick up over the years to now it's really very much the dominant response and what people are, we would tell you rightly focus on. And compliance things are seen as secondary benefits that are sort of table stakes, right? The hygiene factors are familiar with that term as well, like, you got to do them, but if you just get the compliance, no one's going to be happier, it's not going to have a positive impact on your business. But if he gets it accessible, and you truly can demonstrate accessibility, and you truly have user experiences that can be modified and change into the various different modes that everybody that multiple different stakeholders have, that's got the potential to really move the needle, and people believe that. 

32:50 Christopher Michael Lee  

Okay, I can't help myself. I've got one more question. Now, I'm just sitting here thinking about what you know, all of our members, organizational members, what they want me to ask you. And one of the things I think we hear a lot is, where do we start? You know, so you've got this organization that Oh, my God, that I'm reading this so that we pull it for the first time. And like, wow, this is great stuff. It seems a little overwhelming. Where do I go next? 

33:14 Timothy Springer  

So, I'll give you a personally biased answer, which is my true answer and then I'll give you a little bit more behind that. The first thing I recommend is don't try to do this on your own. There are reasons lots of organizations choose to work with people like Level Access, because we will help you figure out what do you actually have to do here. And once you actually have to do here tends to be a relatively narrow scope that we can put into linear buckets, like we can project plan out and figure out how to implement it in a way that doesn't have a big negative impact on your organization, right? It's not a huge distraction. What happens when organizations try to do this on their own, they end up spending a lot of time fixing things that they don't need to fix, and they don't fix things that they do need to fix. The reality is accessibility is not a sort of highly defined one size fits all we can, you know, boil it down to standards, there is a lot of art to it. And that's even reflected in the standards that we have, the most common one being the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. But even in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, precedent in the very name of them is the fact that these are guidelines. And there's a lot of specifics about how it works, but you have to have knowledge to apply them. So that's my first recommendation is you could try to do this on your own. Don't it'll cost way, way, way more to try to do it on your own than to have somebody that really is knowledgeable about this. And as a corollary to that, if you were saying I'm going to start an information security initiative, you would probably go out and find somebody that does information security all the time to help you launch it, you would probably not think you could do it on your own for some reason, people often will be like, Oh, accessibility, this is easy. And like, no, man, it's the same, like scope of domain space as privacy and security are really good examples. So, it's first thing I would tell you is start with getting a really solid vendor in place that can help you figure this out. And they can give you the infrastructure, and they can give you the tools, and it saves you tons of time, tons of money. And it'll also save you a ton of headaches as well, for a bunch of different reasons. The second thing is you got to just have resources for it. So, the idea that we're going to go figure this all out with free tools, and we're going to figure it out with our team learning it that's as equally insane as saying that's going to be your security posture. So, like, I you don't talk to anybody, and they're like, oh, man, we really need to secure our website. And you're like, cool, what's your strategy, and they're like, we're going to do it with free tools we find on the internet via Google search, that's going to be our process for figuring out the approach here. And people will do that in accessibility. And then they're surprised when people come back and they're still facing lawsuits, or they don't have an intelligent strategy. So, it's just like, there is an absurdity there that once you frame it up to someone like that, they're like, okay, I get it. This actually is difficult, we do need to spend some real time, energy and effort on it. Once you get that those two gateways in place, you got a really good vendor you're comfortable working with, and you have the resources and funding to actually go do this and do this properly, then things proceed from there actually in a pretty straightforward fashion. 

36:28 Christopher Michael Lee  

It's great Tim, thank you so much for joining us today. A lot of insights. We look forward to having you back. We look forward to seeing and working on with you version 6 next year in 2025 and again, thank you so much.

36:41 Timothy Springer  

Always a pleasure. See you!

36:43 Christopher Michael Lee  

Take care.

36:43 Timothy Springer  

Bye.

36:45 Speaker  

Do you want to continue the discussion from this podcast? Members can access the Strategic Leader in Accessibility (SLiA) community of practice on our member connections platform. If you are not a member, please check our website for all IAAP membership benefits or email us at info@accessibilityassociation.org and we will be happy to talk about membership and help get you engaged.