Hello everyone, it's four o'clock here in London. Let's get started. Welcome to the DQM Product Office Hour. We've been organizing the session since February last year. So very warm welcome to everyone and especially for those who've been with us since the very start of the office hours. Today we have Sarah Swartz joining us again after great engagement and great responses after last session. So she will be bringing more accessibility engineering expertise. And when it comes to me, you know me, my name is Beata. I'm the Senior Product Manager for DQM. What's on the agenda today? After a quick intro and housekeeping, I will hand over to Sarah for updates on European Accessibility Act. Definitely take note of any questions because Sarah will be running a Q&A following her segment. After that, I will share survey results from the recent Product Office Hours on the most requested features. And towards the end of the session, we will be sharing very exciting updates on a new feature in DQM, AI Insights, and other latest and upcoming releases. What are the Product Office Hours? It's your quarterly session, where myself and our amazing guests share updates on new features, interesting demos, interesting demos, interesting demos. And of course, we always aim to bring experts so that we can have Q &As and answer all your questions that you might have. As I mentioned, the Product Office Hour happens every quarter. The next session after that will be scheduled for September, after that November, February, and so on. So definitely scan that QR code and register or share within your organization. And if you haven't registered for this session, you will be automatically registered for the upcoming sessions. When it comes to the Q&A that we'll have today, you're more than welcome to use the Q&A option. You should have it available in your webinar, in your Zoom panel. So definitely whatever comes to your mind, feel free to ask there. And after a segment, Sarah will answer your questions. And Sarah will answer your questions. And definitely don't be shy. And there's no silly questions. All right. Handing over to Sarah. All right. Well, let's talk about the EAA. I'm going to do a brief overview, and then we'll get into some new material. But just in case there's people here who don't have a lot of familiarity with it, I wanted to talk a little bit about what it is. So at the highest level, the EAA is a directive that aims to improve the functioning of the internal market for accessible products and services by removing barriers created by divergent rules in member states. Businesses will benefit from common rules, easier cross-border trading, and more market opportunities for their accessible products and services once they become accessible products and services. And persons with disabilities and the elderly will benefit from more accessible products and services, better prices, fewer barriers, and more jobs. Next slide. Deadlines. The first one is coming up very quickly next month. All new products and services delivered on or after the date that fall within the scope must comply. It also applies to new versions of existing products and services or new content added after that date. And then in 2030, all in-scope products and services must be compliant. Next slide. Next slide. So the products covered include computers, ATMs, kiosks, smartphones, TVs, and the services are telephony, audio-visual, transportation services, banking, e-books, and e-commerce. Next slide. Next slide. Next slide. Next slide. Next slide. Why is the EAA different than other disability rights laws? Well, there are many reasons. And I think one of the most important ones is that it actually mandates governmental oversight and complaint handling. Other laws do not do this. They have left enforcement up to the courts. In other words, ADA enforcement. In other words, ADA enforcement typically occurs through lawsuits as well as investigations by federal agencies like the Department of Justice. And the consequences of noncompliance are typically determined by the court system on a per-lawsuit basis. These may include settlement fees and injunctive relief. The EAA, on the other hand, designates its member states to to create national authorities responsible for enforcing EAA compliance. These authorities are tasked with monitoring the market for violations and may penalize noncompliant entities. Specific penalties will vary by state. So this is quite a bit different because in countries where the court system is your only recourse, it empowers predatory law firms to go out and target companies, target websites, and then, you know, ask for money, essentially. Whereas with the EAA, if somebody finds your site to be inaccessible in some way, they would file a complaint. And then the government organization would evaluate it. And then I don't know if it will be issue you a citation. Or, you know, you know, give you a complaint, issue a complaint, which you would then have to respond to. So, I mean, who knows how effective this is going to be. I mean, obviously, it's being taken very seriously. But I know people are panicking in some cases, they don't feel ready for it. And what I say is, I don't think right out of the gate on June 28th, there's going to be this massive, like, accessibility crawling engine that's going to go out there and find every inaccessible website. And, you know, I think it's going to be more gradual. And, you know, so it's, it's one of those things where you want to get on this, you want to use accessibility testing software like DQM, you want to have auditing done, manual audits. You know, you want to be doing this in case you do get a complaint. But I don't think you have to panic. That's what I've been telling people lately. Next slide. So, how do you comply with the EAA? First, I want to make sure that people understand the difference between compliance and conformance. Compliance applies to laws. Conformance applies to standards. Businesses and organizations must comply with the law. Businesses and organizations must comply with the law. And technology must conform to standards. For an organization to be compliant with laws like the EAA, its software must be conformant to WCAG 2.1 level AA. But you can be compliant without being fully conformant. This means that perfection is not expected. It is not expected that every page on your website is completely issue-free at all times. It doesn't mean that because you don't have 100% scores or, you know, people can still find issues with your site. That doesn't mean that you're not complying with the law. Next slide. Next slide. For a website to fully conform to WCAG 2.whatever, all conformance requirements must be satisfied. But full conformance on every page at all times is virtually impossible to do is virtually impossible to do. This is because new content is constantly added. You have new people coming in, new developers are trying new technologies. They're using new components and libraries. And, you know, things are going to slip in. It's just, we would have no innovation if we were completely focused on making sure that things were perfectly accessible at all times. But compliance is achieved through good faith effort. And I would also add compliance is achieved through good communication channels with your customers, and especially people who have accessibility issues. Websites that substantially conform are considered accessible by people with disabilities. Next slide. What does substantial conformance look like? What does substantial conformance look like? Well, I would say if you want to draw attention to your site, don't do these things. These are the things that are going to jump out at someone, either an accessibility tester, a person with disabilities trying to use your site, or somebody coming out to, you know, monitor you or, you know, maybe with nefarious intent. To, you know, eventually file a complaint or, you know, eventually file a complaint or a lawsuit or whatever. These are the top things that will literally jump out at them. Everything that can be done with the mouse should also be done with the keyboard. There should be a visible indication of focus on all links, buttons, menus, anything that you can tab to. You shouldn't have to wonder where focus is as you're trying to navigate around the site. Meaningful images, including infographics, charts, graphs, anything that has text that's actually an image, rather than actual text that can be parsed by screen reader. Those need to have really good alternative text. There's multiple ways to do it, depending on what type of graphic it actually is. Your color combinations should meet what K contrast requirements. Your link text should make sense out of context. You should use accessible patterns for lists, tables, forms, anything that's actually an entity, an asset. There's an accessible way to code it, essentially. Or at least make it more accessible. And then have captions on your videos. Next slide. So what does compliance look like? Well, you should publish accessibility statements that identify a point of contact and communicate everything your organization is doing to achieve compliance, wherever you are in your journey. I tell people, be honest, be real, you know. Say, we care, but we know we're not there. Train your employees, especially those who design and develop websites, including content creators, because it's not just about the look and the code. Establish a regular testing schedule and promptly prioritize remediation of your high priority issues. Institutionalize the knowledge gained from audits and remediation, so the approach to accessibility accessibility changes from reactive. Accessibility changes from reactive to proactive. Publish a document describing how your web-based service meets accessibility requirements to whatever degree that it does. This could be a VPAT or another WCAG-based conformance report. And finally, educate your customer service people to respond effectively to queries from people with disabilities. They don't have to be experts, but if they're just given basic knowledge, they're just given basic knowledge of screen readers, keyboard-only access, and empowered to escalate, you know, where they know there's someone that they can get to, the right person that they can escalate to, that will respond in a timely manner. Next slide. Okay. Okay. Thank you so much, Sarah, for sharing your knowledge and clarifying a lot of the topics that we often get asked about. Yes, the first question we received is about the DQM score. Does the DQM score mean EAA compliance? Not directly. And no score does. No score from any tool. No score from any tool. No score from any tool or even coming from a manual audit. Unless that manual audit included every single page on your website. Because typically manual audits just focus on a certain scope. Because typically it's iterative. You know, we test a certain amount of content. And then you remediate. And we go and then, you know, a few months later or whatever, we test some additional content. So scores are just, they're, they can be valuable in tracking progress over time. But they're limited. And they should always be taken in context. Thank you so much for clarifying that. The next question is around the accessibility statement. Is there a specific department that needs to be responsible for that? No, it can be anyone. No, it can be anyone. But typically, it's best if you have someone whose job responsibilities take on like the EAA coordination, just to make sure that there is someone for the complaints or the, you know, suggestions, whatever might be coming in, where it's streamlined. And it's not just, you know, people have to struggle to find that person. But yeah, I mean, it can be anyone. But yeah, I mean, it can be anyone. Great. Let's have a look. Again, anyone can submit their questions through the Q&A panel. So we'll give you a few more minutes to add your questions. DQM can be a valuable tool with, as part of your compliance arsenal, so to speak. It can help you write your accessibility statement. It can help you keep your statements updated. You can refer to it. You can talk about the progress you've made over time in your accessibility statements. And you can use the actual wording that's in DQM. Because a lot of what I'm seeing now are accessibility statements are getting much more explicit. They're not just the, we care about accessibility. We're trying to reach WCAG 2.1. You know, it's, they've kind of become pretty generic in a lot of cases. And one thing that the EAA mandates is better communication and better, more specific documentation. So EAA can provide you with some of the verbiage that you would need for an effective accessibility statement. We've got an interesting question around the deadline. So if an organization doesn't feel like they are on track to fix their accessibility issues, does it still make sense to pursue it? What would you advise those who think they are kind of struggling for time? Just, I would say, don't worry too much about the deadline. Like I was saying, it's a journey. It's a process. There's no perfection. Just get started. Do what you can. It's a process. And on the keyboard, accessibility, is that something that can be automatically tested? Or does it need to be manually tested? tested? Well, we, you always want to manual test full interactivity, basic keyboard, like focus ability that can be manually tested or sorry, that can be automated. And I believe DQM does have checkpoints or elsewhere, cause we're adding new checkpoints. I know Beata will be talking about this. Full keyboard interactivity though does have to be manually tested. Because scanning tools can't alter the state of the, of the application or the page. So when you click on a menu item and it drops down and then you, you know, move through with usually the arrow keys or maybe the tab key to the different links. Um, automated scanning tools can't do that, but they can at least tell you at the outset, if the menu item itself is focusable with the keyboard. Yeah. It's a very good point. Uh, we've just got a question about who can people contact to get more information on this. If already using DQM, what is the next step? Uh, talk to your CSM. Uh, talk to your CSM. I believe your customer success manager. I think everyone has that. Or you can, you can contact Beata and she can forward the request onto the, my team, essentially the services team. Yes, exactly. Um, contacting your customer success manager is, is always the best step to get more and more resources. But at the end of the session, I will be sharing my email address. So you're always welcome to, to email me with any questions and I will forward this to, to the relevant team member on, on our side. Um, anything else that you would like to add, Sarah, before we conclude the segment? Um, maybe just that for people who are panicking or, or thinking, well, it's just too late. I might as well just risk it. Um, I like to use the term security by obscurity. You know, you're probably going to be okay for a while. Um, so, you know, don't be discouraged. Just get to work on it now. And we're here to help. Exactly. That's, that's a great, uh, positive message to conclude with. Thank you again, Sarah, for, for joining us again. Um, great. Um, great. Um, we actually just use another question. However, the question is on DQM AI features. So, um, that's a great segue for us to, um, move on to the DQM, uh, new release AI summary assistant. Um, so in a second, I will tell you all about it. Before I start, um, I just wanted to recap, um, results from a poll that, um, you all, so the participants of the product office hour have completed in one of the previous, uh, office hours. The question was around what are your most requested, uh, features that are expected to come in 2025. Um, so this is the data from the survey. Um, and the most, um, the most votes were received, uh, by AI executive summary, which is part of the AI summary assistant. Um, so again, I'm really happy to be delivering the feature that you all asked for. Another highly requested feature was AI fix suggestions, um, and new exports. So that's to come later on this year. However, what's really around the corner is the JavaScript scanning behind logins and benchmarking score updates, which I will also talk to you more about today. So let's have a look at the AI summary assistant. Um, why, why use it? Why, why is it helpful to anyone? Um, so I think a good understanding of the trends in your dashboards, in your websites can really help help you more, um, targeted decisions around which areas, which sites, uh, in your portfolio. require most resources. Um, it can also lead to cost efficiency. Um, it can also lead to cost efficiency and of course, um, accountability and transparency, uh, are especially needed in, in the, in the climate with upcoming accessibility regulations. And key facts around about the feature. Um, so this is, um, our first AI feature for GQM, which is very exciting for the whole team. is, um, it went live on the 8th of May. Um, and, uh, a key fact is that, um, to be able to use this feature and administrator will need to, from organization will need to accept terms and conditions. When it comes to, um, more of those technical details, um, the AI summary assistant is, um, based on chat GPT. Uh, the team has integrated to, to open AI. Uh, the model we are using is GPT for mini, um, um, and the prompts have been custom created by, by our crown pig experts. Um, what is the feature? Um, so it analyzes, um, the feature analyzes issue counts, uh, from your dashboards to identify trends in your metrics. Um, and why is that, why is that helpful? Uh, I'm sure, uh, um, some of you experienced the feeling when you open GQM, um, you see lots of graphs, numbers, but it's, it's kind of hard to get the idea, get the idea at the first glance, if we are progressing or not, improving or not. So this is the gap that we're trying to fill with the progress summary. Um, it provides you the executive level insight based on the three month rolling period. So the summary you will see, um, is based on the data from the last three months. Um, in the future, we want to give you more options to, to define, uh, uh, the period that the, the tool is looking at. Um, and of course, with this kind of summary, it will make it easier for you to share internal awareness in your organization about the, the improvements and the work your team is doing, uh, and, and more, and quantify the, the impact of the of this improvements. Um, um, we are releasing this feature as part of a trial phase. Um, so what is the trial phase? It's a free of charge access to the feature, to the progress summary. Um, it will, it's starting the moment you, um, activate the feature, um, for a limited time period. Um, so we haven't defined yet the, what is it, time period. However, we strongly encourage you to start it as soon as possible. When the time comes to switch it up and finish the trial phase, your users will be informed. So don't worry, we'll not switch it out of the blue. And after that, AI and DQM will become available as an add-on for those who are interested in purchasing that. More about how to activate the feature. So some of you, most of you probably noticed the new blue AI Insights button on your dashboards. Just to reassure you that even though this button is visible on your dashboard, no data is shared with OpenAI until you accept the AI terms and conditions. So yeah, the button basically is there, but remains inactive. And of course, the data privacy is at the center of the way we develop AI features. Your organization cannot be identified. So we can see how to identify the data from the data we share with OpenAI. We don't share any of your website content, any of your company name. We share the issue counts. And the way for us to identify your company name is just internal encrypted ID, which only makes sense to the DQM system, not to the AI. So we are aware that this is a key value for our customers. And now is the part of the product office hour that everyone is always looking forward to. So a demo of the tool. I will now log into my account. Thank you. All right, let's get started. So of course, this view looks familiar. It's a dashboard in DQM. This is where most of you start your day. And of course, our new AI insights button is visible in the top right. Most of you probably tried clicking on it. Before activating, all you can see is additional information on what this feature is doing. And to activate that your organization admin can navigate to the explore feature page. This page provides you with more insights about the capabilities of the future and how it works. The key part of that is, of course, accepting the terms and conditions. To view the terms and conditions, you can click on the terms and conditions button, which directs you to our Crown Pink Governance Center. And here you can locate our AI addendum under the legal hub. So of course, the legal hub. So of course, this available in two languages in English and German. After reviewing the AI addendum and all the details, your administrator is able to activate the feature. So the feature activation only needs to be done once per organization. Now you can see the feedback that AI Insights Region has been activated. Once this has been activated, the AI Insights become available for all users in your organization. So I will navigate back to my group overview. And now upon clicking AI Insights, the data is being shared to OpenAI. As I mentioned, we are not sharing any website content, only issue accounts are being shared. And this is the summary that we are provided with, which can be used not only to simplify understanding of what's happening in your dashboards, but also use your in your reporting, your presentations and share the awareness of organization on how great your team is performing. I will just call out that in this demo. I will just call out that in this demo, we are getting the summary, even though there are no changes in issues in the period we have selected. It's because this is a demo environment and I'm looking at production data. However, in your production environments, that will be, of course, you will have data visible in the group issues. Before I conclude the demo, I wanted to show you two more features that I will discuss. I will discuss in a bit more detail in a bit more detail in a second. A long awaited feature for many users is German language support. So now what we have added is the the drop down in the top right with the language. To change the language, simply select your target language. And now the language has been updated. in the top right with the language. In the future, more languages will become available with French as our next target language. Additionally, what's what's new is the benchmarking scores widget on the website or review dashboard. Previously, the benchmarking scores were only visible on the group overview screen. However, you can see the benchmarking scores. So I'm sure that will simplify your processes for many of the participants here. All right, let's move back to the presentation. From the resources available for you, we have demo video, which shows the activation guide for the AI feature, which shows the activation guide for the AI feature, and also a user guide, where you are being told step by step how to use the feature and how to activate it. So you can access that by scanning the QR code. And we'll also make sure that this will be the links will be shared with a recording of this webinar. And now I prepared a very brief survey to find out a bit more about your preferences on what AI features you would like to see in DQM next. So the first question that I will ask you to answer is whether you need an additional help with setting up a AI summary assistant in the AI summary assistant in DQM. This will help me reach out to those who specifically need help with setting up the AI summary assistant. The second question is around which AI powered features would you like to see in DQM? And the final question is around whether there are any other AI powered features that you'd like to see in DQM. So I will give you a second to answer the questions. All right. Thank you for all the answers. Let's move on. Latest releases. So AI Summer Assistant was not the only exciting release in the last quarter. So AI Summer Assistant was not the first year. So AI Summer Assistant has been a great deal with the benchmarking score. As I showed you in the demo, you can now view the benchmarking scores on a website level. Previously that was only available in the website leaderboard and the group performance. And this feature has been live since end of last, last month. So here we're talking about a benchmarking scores widget on the right-hand side. As I showed you in the demo as well, it's very exciting to have German language support in DQM. Just to mention that the German language support is coming to DQM in two releases. The first release which we have now went live includes translations of DQM options, buttons, menus, all kinds of headings. However, checkpoint names and descriptions are still in development. So translating those will come in the second release. So even when you change the language to German, it's still visible in English just to pre-empty any questions. However, this is to be translated very, very soon. So as I showed you earlier, this is a new drop down in the top right of the DQM interface. Now, another highly awaited feature is ability for DQM to log in into websites. As you might know, this is obviously available. That was historically available for the HTML scanner. However, not for the JavaScript scanner. And with the tendency of more sites being based on JavaScript, it is very important for our scanner to be able to detect also the JavaScript element. So what we have worked on is handling a simple form authentication for the JavaScript scanner, dismissing cookie banners to enable the scanner to access the page and handle the page and handle edge verification gates, which is often the case for many e-commerce sites. And I'm very happy to announce that this is this feature is now available for set customers. What that means is that we are not mass migrating the sites, which wouldn't be very feasible. However, those customers who would like to request for their sites for their sites to be set up for the new JavaScript scanner have an option to do so. How can that be achieved? How can you get your sites on the new JavaScript scanner? The process for that is to create a support ticket. This is the fastest way for you to get your site set up. We've been having already a high number of frequent requests to requests to do that, especially with the upcoming European accessibility act deadline. There's even more emphasis on covering all your sites with automated scans. So in your support ticket to Crownpeak support, please include a list of sites that you would like to scan with the scanner that you would like us to log in. Make sure to include the URL and login credentials. So at this point, it's very important to call out that we at the moment we are not and obviously which is the nature of our scanner is not handling one page applications. So if your page requires clicking on multiple buttons to bring up all elements, that's currently not the scope for the scanner. So this is just for everyone to monitor expectations. But however, if you are not and if you are not and if you are not sure, it's never harmed to create a support ticket and our team will evaluate your site. So yes, definitely get your requests submitted as much as possible since there's quite high demand for this. Upcoming releases. Another highly requested release. that is going to be a number of requests that is going to come in July are the updated scores. We've been aware that our legacy benchmarking scores are sometimes not very transparent or could be more actionable. That's why we're bringing to you a new updated scoring system. What's going to change? All checkpoints will now have equal weights. which will prevent some of the challenges that our users have been facing. For example, solving a number of issues without significant impact on the score. Now we'll make sure that solving issues will have equal impact on the score. Additionally, only checkpoints directly linked to WCAG guidelines will contribute to your accessibility score. just to make sure that your efforts are really targeted towards the accessibility conformance. And we are also making user interface updates so that it's very clear which checkpoints contribute to the score. And as always, I would like to encourage you to have a look at our roadmap, which is available at dkm-portal.crounting.com. Here you can see all features that are currently being researched under considerations or planned and launched. That also gives you an opportunity to submit your votes and or submit your ideas and make sure that your voice is really heard. And that's very important for me as well, that we're building the features that you would like to see in DQM the most. And here just a few examples of features that users can vote for. And that brings us towards the end of the session. I will now launch our final poll where I would love to gather your feedback on how the session went and how useful it was. Thank you. Thank you very much for attending. Definitely take a note of my email address and I'm here to answer any of your questions. You're always welcome to email me. And I'm wishing you a lovely rest of your day.