All right. Well, let's get started and kick this off. Again, welcome everyone to Crownpeak and REO's Global Digital Accessibility webinar, Navigating International Regulations and Standards. So before we jump into our presentation today, we're going to do some quick introductions. First of all, my name is Ashley Barker and I'm a Solutions Engineer here at Crownpeak. I get the privilege to work with prospective clients as well as our current clients to truly understand how digital accessibility plays into the company and how it can be used in lots of different ways. And working for Crownpeak, Crownpeak is a leading provider and digital experience platform. And one of those pieces is our digital quality management solution, which we'll talk a little bit about here today. Thanks Ashley. Hi everyone. I'm Thomas Hyand, Research and Insights Leader at Rio Digital. So I'm heading up all things related to customer experience research, digital accessibility and behavior analytics. And a little background into Rio. So we're a customer experience agency with over a decade of experience in accessibility, experimentation and research across industries like financial services and insurance and retail utilities and beyond. And we're pretty passionate about helping organizations design inclusive user centered products that deliver exceptional customer experiences across their sites and services. So yeah, we're really looking forward to the session today on digital accessibility. I've always been very interested in the welfare of traditionally underrepresented people and a keen advocate for accessibility. So I'm ready to go. Amazing. Well, let's get into it. So we'll cover our agenda. So first, we are going to uncover the essence of this vital concept of digital accessibility. So think of it like stepping in a new world where technology meets inclusivity. And we'll also learn why digital accessibility truly matters to everyone. Next, we'll venture into that regulatory landscape. We're going to equip ourselves with the knowledge to navigate this challenging environment. We'll cover both the risks and the benefits of digital accessibility. We'll take a look at digital accessibility in action. What does it look like in the real world? What are some of those triumphs? We'll cover a couple strategies for compliance. And finally, we will consolidate all of our newfound knowledge and plan our next move. So you can kind of think of this like charting our course for a digital accessibility journey armed with insights and hopefully some inspiration as to why, again, digital accessibility is truly important in our global world. So before we delve into some of the details, let's kind of just understand what we're here talking about today. What is digital accessibility? And when we think about our physical world, when we think about accessibility in our physical world, we can see ramps. We can see accessible bathrooms. We can see those real world examples of how people with disabilities can interact in the physical world. Now what's interesting is all of those same design theories, all of those same theories still need to be done, but in a digital way. Yeah, that's a good example actually for the curb cuts, going down to tactile paving in the physical world, benefiting everyone. So wheelchairs, strollers, bicycles, luggage, these things are visible. So in digital accessibility, it's all about designing technology, whether it's for websites, apps or online tools, so that people with different disabilities can use them just as easy as anyone else. So it's ensuring that everyone, regardless of their ability, has equal access to digital content and services. It's really important because it helps people from being excluded from those essential services. And so around the world, both governments and organizations are starting to address this, as you're about to introduce, with standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which are going to provide clear criteria for making this digital content accessible for everyone. Exactly. And when we think about digital accessibility at its core, we have kind of the definition. We know that it's going to matter to have equal access and information for all users. When you think about how digital accessibility impacts key regulations, it impacts the entire world globally, right? We have regulations within the US, within EU, Canada, and we'll jump into a couple of those a little bit later on. But really what we want to demonstrate here is that digital accessibility is critical to the design process. And one of the standards when we think about digital accessibility is what we call those WCAG guidelines. You're going to hear this a lot throughout the presentation. So Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It's often the acronym we use is WCAG or WCAG. You can think of these kind of as the set of guidelines that's at the basis of most of the global regulations. If for some of my people out there, if you think about WCAG, it's kind of the one set of rules to rule them all, right? They are the basis for everything. And then people can add on and adjust as needed. But understanding some of those criteria is really key to digital accessibility. Now, one of the interesting parts, Thomas, that I think we hear all the time is, okay, great accessibility. Can this just be a checkbox? What can we do? And one of the things that we end up teaching everyone is that accessibility is a continuous process. When we think about our websites, our websites are living and breathing. We have promotions. We have things going on. A couple years ago, we had a major global health scare. So websites are constantly updating and evolving. And therefore, digital accessibility has to do the same in order to keep the companies, in order for the companies to stay on top of these regulations and being able to publish new content that is within those guidelines rather than trying to always be reactive and fixing issues. Yeah, you hear a lot about this. It is a little tempting. I think you've mentioned it already, but it is a little tempting. I think for people to think of accessibility as a kind of technical challenge that needs to be ticked off in a list of things to do. But as you mentioned, it really is a journey of continual improvement. It's not going to happen by accident, that's for sure. It has to be purposely planned and built and tested. And yeah, as you mentioned, whopping 97% of websites, but 70% of customers, for instance, leave a website they find difficult to use. Absolutely. And it's really interesting because what we hear when we think about some of the regulations out there is that in general, regulators are typically more concerned about the quality of their products. They're usually more concerned about the progress that you're making and the fact that you acknowledge that digital accessibility is an ongoing process as opposed to being perfect. And really, when we think about this, consumers are only becoming more and more educated and expecting more from our websites, especially when we have a lot more people working remote, lots more kids are online doing school. The expectations of not just privacy, but actually being able to navigate a website and the accessibility is really important. And we're starting to hear consumers actually ask what sites are accessible and what kind of accreditations those sites have. So again, it's just one of those things that we're only seeing growing in the market. So we covered a little bit some of those high level regulations that, you know, US, Canada, APAC. Before we discuss those a little bit more, I think it's really important, again, to understand what is at the basis of these digital accessibility regulations. So we spoke about those web content accessibility guidelines. Just to give you an idea, these are developed and maintained by an international community that actually develops open standards to ensure truly the long term growth of the web. So it's one of those items that it's really important to understand the basis of this because it's really important to understand the basic of this. Because these regulations are built upon WCAG. Now that doesn't mean those WCHE guidelines are the end all be all, but it is a great starting point and a great point for us and our teams to kind of take that jump off into digital accessibility. All right. So some of our compliance standards here. So in 2024, what are we looking at? What's current? What's upcoming? So when we think about in the US, Americans with Disability Act or the ADA has been interpreted to actually apply to digital content. And what's interesting is recent developments within the US Department of Justice have started requiring state and federal governments to be accessible, especially with the elections coming up. In Canada, they have the ACT, the Accessible Canada Act, as well as the AODA for Ontario. So Canada has really started to pull together the information and start requiring their different regions to come along with digital accessibility. And something that's really, really interesting that we've seen a big increase in momentum is in the APAC region. We're seeing countries like Australia with its Disability Discrimination Act and Japan with its revisions to its own standards. These two countries are truly leading the way in the Asia Pacific region. And Thomas, I know I talked just a little bit about EAA for the EU in June of 2025. But I know you have more information on that as well as some specifics about the UK. Yeah, I'll take everyone through that because it becomes a little bit more nuanced. But the good news is that they're all kind of working towards a standard, which is good. So as you mentioned, the European Accessibility Act has a deadline of June 28, 2025. That's when all of the 27 EU member states are going to have this applied to any organization selling products or services within the EU. So the standards that they use are not WCAG. It's called EN 301519. It's not a particularly catchy name, but it's their version of WCAG accessibility standards. And that applies to websites, apps, and digital products and so on. And so actually since 2020, this has already been in force. So public sector websites within the EU are already having to meet that standard. And it's essentially based on WCAG 2.1. But they go a little bit further with the EAA version. So they're covering things like modifiable captions on video content and biometrics. So if you're in tech and you're using things like facial recognition or fingerprint authentication, accessibility needs to be built into those within the EU. And so in the UK, it gets a little bit more complicated because we left the EU, obviously, and we have a Quality Act of 2010, which mandates that organizations have to make reasonable adjustments to ensure everyone can no one's disadvantaged basically. And then we also have another update from 2022 for the public sector, which is called PSAR, Public Sector Accessibility Regulations. And so that's essentially repealing all of the EU and replacing it with UK equivalent standards for the public sector. And they're basing it on the WCAG guidelines, not the EN 301549. So it's looking like the UK is going to continue that in the kind of private sector to follow the WCAG standards for accessing and evaluating accessibility compliance. Would it be fair to say that it sounds like the UK is taking WCAG kind of as that base and standard and then beefing it up with some of those technological advances that you were talking about? Yeah, it seems like that's the way we're going, which I think is a really good thing, obviously. And standardization, knowing that we've got the same thing, the same set of criteria across countries is very important. Although it is, we do have to be a little bit mindful to not fall into that mindset of if it's not in WCAG, it's not important for accessibility. So we want to go beyond just ticking boxes as we want to create experiences that work for everyone all the time. So these are really important and they help us to understand how to make content accessible. But it's not everything. So when we think about digital accessibility, let's talk about some of those risks of not having a digital accessibility program and some of those risks that come along with non-compliance. So I know there is a ton of information on this page, a ton of words, but what I really want to draw your attention to is first and foremost, you'll notice that most of these organizations that have statistics on here, it's truly a global issue. So we have information from the World Health Organization, the United Nations, CDC, US Census Bureau. It is truly a global initiative. And so, again, when we think about not having a solid digital accessibility program and not following some of those best practices, when we think about the number of users that will just completely leave a site, 71% of users will jump off that site if it's not accessible. Imagine them clicking a link, it opens in a new tab, but the code doesn't tell them and they click and they click and it's frustrating. And then they just bounce off the site. This is where we see the bounce rates incredibly high. And so understanding that by having more accessible content, we can potentially open up that market. The other number I wanted to draw your attention to is 30%. This is the increase in web accessibility lawsuits from 2019 to 2020. From each year that we're seeing, this percentage is steadily increasing. And what's interesting is we're starting to see a little bit of an increase on e-commerce. Thomas, I wanted to just get your take on this. What on this page kind of stands out to you from your perspective? Yeah, there's a lot of big numbers there, global disability prevalence and statistics around that. But I mean, I find it really helpful to bring it back to sort of small scale when I'm working with people, say in a room. So maybe I'm in a room full of different stakeholders. I might say something like, look, remember, it means that one in five people has some form of disability. So if we're in a room with 20 people, there's four of us likely to have a disability. And most of us are going to know someone, a friend or a family member or a colleague who faces these kind of challenges. So also think about the teams that we work with and the customers we serve. You have a team of 100 employees, giving 20 people dealing with accessibility issues every day. I love that thought process because I think at taking that same thought process, you can apply that to your own business. All right. So we kind of talked about some of the not so great parts or the risks that can be expected. So some of the risks that can be associated with a lack of digital accessibility, whether it be lawsuits or people bouncing off your site. But Thomas and I think it's really important to understand that digital accessibility truly has tangible benefits for the business. Again, we know it's the right thing to do, but some of those tangible benefits of a good accessibility program is the ability to minimize and reduce those risks overall. And what I mean by that is there's a series of things that we can do. So, for instance, Crown Peak, again, we're a DXP and one part of that DXP, an important part, is our content management system, our first spirit. And it is one of the only CMSs on the market that has a native integration for digital accessibility and quality. And what this means is that when your teams are truly in the content creation phase and they're developing the content, creating it within the CMS, they can have a real time scanner that's going within their CMS that tells them, hey, that picture does not have an alt text. Or, Thomas, I know we see this all the time, the picture may have an alt text, but it's only one word. And so you may have solved one issue, but you actually introduced another one by not solving that first issue completely. So being able to integrate these digital accessibility concepts as far as early into the process is kind of what we call that shift left mentality. So the sooner we can introduce it, the easier and the cheaper it is to actually fix it. Now, we know that we can't always connect directly to a CMS. And so it is really critical to make sure you have automated scans. And what that means is an external scanner, again, Crown Peak's DQM is an external scanner. And when we start to pull and aggregate all of that data, what we find is that we can actually start to introduce a sense of competition. Into digital accessibility, you know, no one ever wants to be last. No one wants to have the finger pointed at them. And so trying to gamify this a little bit, we feel like has helped connect customers to the importance of digital accessibility. Yeah, I like that, actually. That connects to a lot of the work that we do when we're consulting within businesses. I mean, I like the idea of the rankings and the leadership boards that you guys have, because it brings people together, right? It couples the accessibility outcomes to the business outcomes. And, you know, it's really useful to sort of cement bonds across departments and motivate people by performance and also celebrate the successes together. I think that's a really important part of accessibility. So I like that piece. Absolutely. And yeah, the celebrating the successes, because it's again, as a continuous effort, you want to make sure you're hitting those milestones and that your team feels encouraged. So that's that's a really good point. And when we think about kind of closing out how we can minimize those risks, being able to have that real time guidance, as Thomas is talking about, having those expert partners that can help you navigate some of these regulations and compliances. And then, of course, as Thomas mentioned, those reports, it's just critical. We need to know where we are today, as well as be able to track our progress so that we can tell not just our internal leadership, but regulators as well that, hey, we're working on it. Now. It can digital accessibility, a good digital accessibility program, of course, can minimize some of those risks. But I want to talk about a little bit about how this can truly strengthen and amplify your brand in a couple of ways. So when we think about your brand as a whole and digit, the digital quality of it as a whole, one of the things that's important are some of your branding guidelines, right? So every company has the color, the font, make sure you write the company name correctly. Well, those are all things that are incredibly important to your brand, but that can also impact digital accessibility. So at Crown Peak, we actually have the capability to create what we call custom checkpoints. And what that does is that helps you start to really take control of the information and the brand. And when you start to understand and regulate it, then you can prioritize those goals. And Thomas, I wanted to ask you a little bit about prioritizing accessibility goals, because I know this is something we both work on a lot and you have some really interesting ways about you have really interesting ways of thinking about prioritizing accessibility. Yeah, okay. Yes. So basically, what I see happen is we get a lot of people who want to audit, and then they may not action those or really aid those in any sense, then they have to reorder because the site's changed. And so Crown Peak's bringing that kind of much needed structure and process to the organization by giving people a tool. So it's reinforcing that shift left mindset that you're talking about and giving people a way of building that into the kind of natural workflow. I kind of think of it like you wouldn't publish a Word document without spell checking it first. And so the people who are working on designing digital products and services, they need to get to the point where they wouldn't launch a website without ensuring it's accessible first. And so, you know, Ria, we help people to do that, and we'll dive into that a little bit later. But yeah, we want to kind of shift away from that kind of mindset of we'll do a full manual audit, but we won't remediate any of those issues. And so Crown Peak's a good way of doing that, really. And I love your perspective. I love it when you talk about, you know, you wouldn't send a document to a, you wouldn't send a document without spell checking. We need to have that same fervor when it comes to digital accessibility that we won't put content out unless everyone can use it and be able to navigate our websites properly. And, you know, we've talked about some of the benefits, but I think it's really interesting how much natural overlap digital accessibility has with things like on-page SEO. And so I wanted to get your thoughts on some of these peripheral benefits of accessibility as it relates to markets and SEO. Yeah, I mean, so we have a sister brand called Skitsor who takes care of SEO. And, you know, what we find is that there's so many digital assets that are just not built with accessibility in mind. So one of the things that we get from working on accessibility is a lot of SEO benefits and broadening people's audience reach or creating more customers. It all just falls out kind of for free from improving accessibility. So in terms of SEO, the Google algorithms prioritize content that's user friendly and accessible. So, you know, when you're optimizing for accessibility, you're improving your search rankings because you're just making clearer, more navigable content. And it's kind of important to remember a lot of access to the improvements that, you know, those supporting assistive technologies, for instance, like a screen reader, they're happening behind the scenes. So they're not going to change the visual experience for most users anyway, but they do make your site more readable for those kind of blind Google bots to help get your content indexed and improve a site's visibility. And that's all about impacting the visual design, really. And you mentioned Google, and I wanted to just bring that back up is, you know, Google acts as a blind user when it's crawling and indexing your sites. And so if we identify and can find those same items that Google does, then we again are both helping digital accessibility while sharpening our on-page SEO at the same time. Yeah, absolutely. I'll give you some examples. So like headers, for instance, of pages, which should be ordered and logical. You know, the Google bot is reading those. And so if there's a duplicate, then it's going to cannibalize the performance of the page, for instance. Or let's say an alt tag for an image. You know, that's going to, a descriptive alt tag will help search engines understand the context of your images, which is going to improve indexing. And there are other things like metadata and title tags, and it's going to ensure that you can easily interpret and categorize your content and even page load speed and mobile automation, which is also linked to accessibility. So there's lots of things there, lots of overlap between SEO and accessibility. And so it's also going to boost your public perception as well, because you're doing something, you're demonstrating it to the audience. You're doing something, you're demonstrating a commitment to your corporate social responsibility, right? And so that's going to attract people and loyal customers, because they're going to appreciate the fact that you care about being inclusive, you're taking an inclusive approach. And then, you know, when we make all these improvements, we're elevating user experience for everyone. We often talked about that, that you can increase user engagement and conversion rates. That's a really good point. And when we think about brand loyalty, I know just in my personal life, when I have a family member that doesn't have such a positive experience, especially on a website with digital accessibility, it is a group text message out to everyone saying, this is what happened. This is why it happened. And the inverse is true. And especially with my grandma, she finds a site that she truly likes. She sends that out on the text message and says, this is a great site, I can use it. Okay, Thomas, this is kind of our favorite part, because this is where we actually get to the bottom of the conversation. This is where we actually get to talk about all of this in action. What does it look like? Who's using it? And I'm actually going to start us off by talking about one of Crown Peak's customers, Mars, and just a phenomenal success story, because it's not only a success story, but it's an ongoing story. You know, one of the things that you may know Mars for, the one that I knew most for, were of course the candy. But Mars has multiple business segments in pet care and food and candy. So there's lots of areas that they touch. And one of the things that's really interesting is Mars has been a customer with Crown Peak for quite a while, and they have always made it clear that they are committed to inclusive and accessible experiences. And I put on this slide one of the statements they have on their website, because it's something that absolutely resonates with me. And it's that they say the world we want tomorrow is the world we want to be in. The world we want tomorrow starts with how we do business today. And I think that is such a powerful message, because they put their money where their mouth is, right? They ensure that their experiences try to be as accessible as possible. So it's one of those items that Mars has worked really hard on. And, you know, being proactive in this area has allowed them to plan for EAA, the European Accessibility Act, which again, June 2025 is the deadline. I hate to keep saying it, but it's coming so fast for almost at Christmas time. Thomas, this is I'm going to have to tell you. This is probably one of my favorite customer stories that you have just because of some of the benefits that you have. Really worked on. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Yeah, so I included this because I wanted to show something from the kind of the other end of the spectrum. So people who are just starting to build a culture around digital accessibility and how do you do that? And so Mr. and Mrs. Smith are kind of boutique hotel, but they're really dedicated to ensuring that digital assets are accessible essentially. It's kind of core value, mission of theirs. And they're a part of the Hyatt Company and they're already doing a lot of work around accessibility, but they partnered with us to kind of kickstart that process towards creating an inclusive design team. And so make sure that they've got good user experiences across those different access needs. And so the first thing we did was to we did a live event. It's called CX Circle in London. And we hosted this kind of live event with the team and lots of different people all getting involved in a kind of activity and a live demonstration of screen reader as well. But we were trying to showcase how you get senior buy-in by aligning the accessibility goals with testimonials like we were showing with a live screen reader demo. With the business objectives and how important it is to start that process and to get a seat at the table, so to speak. And so the work that we kind of did with them after that was about running comprehensive manual audits to understand where they were at and to prioritize those issues and get them remediated to WCAG AA level. But those real world user testing insights that we included, so people using screen readers and navigating the site with mouse alternatives like keyboards. This really gave the kind of the stakeholders who weren't there a clearer picture of how accessibility and purpose are directly impacting their users. And so all of this has a really big impact on the culture. And so, you know, we work with our clients, other clients like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, on how best to implement the fixes and how best to gain a deeper understanding into people with different access needs and the value that inclusive design brings to their business. And maintaining, you know, their core values around inclusivity and how we can continue to do that along their accessibility journey. All right, Thomas, I'm going to put you a little bit on the spot, but can you talk a little bit about the empathy lab? I think this is a really phenomenal idea. And you spoke a little bit about it with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but I'd love for you to let everyone know what that is. I didn't know you know about that. Okay, the empathy lab is something that I set up in our London lab two or three years ago. There are a few of these around the world, but we have a mobile version and one that's in our lab. And so it's a place where we bring anyone who's willing to learn actually, clients and non-clients, prospective clients, to raise education awareness around accessibility. And we have to set up many different stations to go and experience what it's like for someone with a different access need to navigate and interact with your site. And there's kind of interactive elements that you can, you know, use simulators to see what it's like for that person. And you tune into interviews and usability testing and you see people having challenges in real world scenarios. And so it really galvanizes teams and they go back kind of energized and wanting to do something about accessibility. And so, yeah, that's what the empathy lab is about, really. It's funny that you know about that. It's one of those things that it's hard not to share because it's truly when you can connect people to the experience, then they have more of a personal stake in it. They can understand the frustration of trying to navigate. So I just think it's such a critical point that you guys introduce this and how it truly functions in the real world rather than just saying, you know, let's make this screen reader applicable. What does that mean? Yeah. All right. So lots of different information. What are some of the ways that we can get started with digital accessibility? So the way we kind of think about this, we think about this in kind of three ways, right? So first, first step is evaluate the current state. Where are you today? What does a quick automated scan of your site look like? You know, Crown Peak can run a scan on your website, be able to identify those top issues that are impacting the pages. And then of course, the second part to that is once you understand where you are developing a plan and developing best practices to ensure that we can not only meet our goals, but that we can also upskill and train our teams and establish a program of just best practices in general. And, you know, being able to leverage partners that understand this area, that understand the regulations and how WCAG is applied to various websites. It's, you know, those are part of programs that are really important to understand. And I think that's really where we see a lot of success. And Thomas, you can add on to this, but I feel like when we see customers starting to integrate these practices into everyday work, it becomes again more of a, you know, a personal accountability and they truly want to make stuff look and feel more accessible. Yes, a lot of the work that we do at Rio is more around the consulting, around the, you know, the actual uplifting of accessibility from pretty much all angles. So we start with the small scale stuff like the audits, but we work our way up to change management and leadership coaching and so on. And so, yeah, here you go, accessibility audits. So, I mean, we've already alluded to that with the Mr. and Mrs. Smith kind of success story there. But I mean, the automated scans that Brown people do are really, really helpful, but they do only go so far. So we kind of pick up where they live off with manual audits that typically identify about 60 to 70% more issues because we're using assistive technologies to kind of mimic how real users interact with your site. And so we'll get experts to evaluate a site accessibility performance against criteria using several assistive technologies. But even then, audits alone will fail to capture the kind of full picture of human centered experience or uncover all the opportunities for improvements in usability testing. So that's what we'll do. We'll go beyond the technical audits and we'll conduct sessions with people with disabilities in real life scenarios. You know, you can uncover things that might not technically violate a guideline, but can significantly disrupt user experience. So this approach helps us to really create inclusive, seamless online experiences for everyone by combining these two things together. I mean, yeah, I don't know if you have anything to say about that, but I think those two things together really are a package and they kind of they do support, as you say, where people can see someone else struggling. That really has a lot of impact. Absolutely. And to just add on to what you were talking about with the accessibility audits, you mentioned the automated and the manual. I think that's a really important piece to understand is that, you know, automated scans can get a percentage, but you will always need that human eye or that human interaction. And when we're thinking about matching captions to videos and timings and context, I think it's a really key differentiation that you pointed out that, you know, automated goes up to a certain point and then we take over with some of that manual. So not just giving you a piece of paper with all the check boxes that you have to do this and this, but actually empowering your teams to learn and upskill as they're going. Yeah, it's got to be woven into your entire digital strategy because we want to shift your mindset from, you know, this is an accessibility project or program to it's just the way we do things around here across the board. And again, you can think back to the spell checking a document example there, I suppose, and that is a good example of that. Because culture is stressful for Britain, because everyone falls apart and you step away, it's going to be too fragile. So, you know, the goal really is to deepen that into your culture and make it like, really just the way things are done. So we often say that the success should be measured really on, you know, whether the organization can continue driving that accessibility initiatives without you. That's right. And, you know, I'm going to go back to your phrase that you said that culture each strategy for breakfast. And Thomas, we have seen that over and over again that it truly does start from the top and encouraging leadership to understand the importance of it really just helps in every area of your website in general. Yeah, absolutely. So, Thomas, I know we have gone through quite a bit of information. We've talked about the basis of these regulations, which are those WCAG guidelines. We've talked about some of the risks and the benefits. But when we think about what are these, you know, what are the top takeaways? What are the main points brass tacks that we want to understand? And number one for me is that accessibility is a continuous process. This is an ongoing living and breathing thing. And because guidelines and websites are constantly being updated, you need to make sure that you and your teams are in the same loop and that you understand what's coming. And then I know we've said this quite a bit, but I feel like another incredibly important point is that WCAG, those Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, they serve as the basis, but they are definitely not the end-all be-all, as we mentioned earlier with some of the UK pieces of the legislation. You know, they're going above and beyond WCAG, but WCAG is a fabulous foundation for us to kind of start our journey. And Thomas, with partnering, I'm going to leave number three and four to you because I really feel like the culture thing, you've made some amazing points, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on partnering with the right people. Sure, sure, sure. Yes, I mean, partnering with experts, my advice, the takeaway would be to at least initially outsource the accessibility expertise. You know, like, eventually you're going to want some in-house expertise, but initially you're going to want to hire experts and make sure they're really experts. That's a key thing there. Amazing. So, I know we've got several questions that have come in, and Thomas, I'll go ahead and start with... Give me one second. I can't see any questions, sorry. Yes, yep, yep. One of them is being... Okay, there we go. Sorry, one of them was being typed as we were talking. Okay. All right, so one of the questions that came in is what should we be looking for in an accessibility partner? You mentioned a partner. Yeah, that's a good question. So, yeah, when you want to get some experts, right, so you need to look for things like if you're looking to do audits, then sample audits. You know, look at the output of the audits, have they got that or have they got any experience with user testing? They should have clips, even if any agency or consultancy or business should have some sort of example output of what they do. And you should also look for accreditations, and so they should be signed up to the IAAP. So, this is the International Standards Body for Accessibility. So, you want accredited people to work on your products. So, yeah, I don't know if you have any others, Ashley. That's where I would start anyway. No, that's a great start. I think IAAP certification is a good start and making sure that, you know, that they have the appropriate staff. So, no, I think that's a great piece of advice. Oh, okay. This is, and actually, Thomas, I'm going to throw this one at you first. So, how would you go about starting discussions around accessibility with management, ELT, and how to get buy-in? I know that's kind of a loaded question, but. Yeah, that's a gigantic question as well. Let me try and tackle that. So, this is kind of like jumping off the back of Mr. and Mrs. Smith and that kind of level of time. So, what we normally do is we assess people's maturity. It really depends on where you're at in terms of the business's maturity around accessibility, and there's ways of assessing that. So, we'll kind of pinpoint people first. But I think that, you know, it's a combination of, as I said before, aligning evidence with organizational goals. So, what is the stakeholder actually trying to achieve? If you want to get change, you're going to need to budget for change within the organization. And so, you need to find the leaders that align with the senior stakeholder goals to get that buy-in. You know, describe how you're solving a problem, and that problem will solve your own stakeholders problem. So, that's a kind of way. So, when we did that exercise, we had what's the goal of the business and what's the objective? What's our strategy and what's the tactics within that strategy and what are our success metrics? So, that's a really good way of starting that. And then I think you recorded testimonies of customers, as I mentioned again. So, if you have those kind of assets of people talking about how they're frustrated with your company's software and experience, they're a lot more powerful than, you know, laws and risks of mitigation and statistics. So, yeah, those are those two are a really good start, I would say. Absolutely. I think the only thing, the only part that I would add onto that is we're starting to see a lot of movement in presenting how digital, how a good and or bad digital accessibility program not only impacts your top line revenue, but your bottom line revenue as well. Right. So, we can minimize risks, reduce demand letters, reduce how many settlement court cases that we have to do, while at the same time creating an inclusive environment that opens up that market segment that has historically not been available to a lot of companies. So, when you're talking to some of the leadership, sometimes the dollar signs seem to really make an impact. So, that's the only thing I would add on to you. You reminded me of that quote from Don Bridges. He said something like, if you ever have to make a business case, find out how upper management is compensated. So, you can say something like, so what's 20% of your customer base worth, your organization? Yeah, I like that. And just really quick, we have several more questions. I'm not sure that we'll have time. We will definitely follow up on all the questions. But Thomas, I think we have time for one more, and I want to address this one, because I think this is a good potential question to end on. But do we know how the EAA will be enforced? What do you mean by enforced? So, it looks like, have they talked about fines and what some of the implications are around non-compliances to EAA? Oh, I see. You mean, so what are the legal ramifications to not being compliant within the EU? Yeah, it's not as clear as in the US. The US is much more pressing. It's been going on for a lot longer. So, I'm presuming it's going to follow suit. There will be things like customer litigation cases. I don't know about numbers. This is not as clear to me, I don't think. Yeah, I think that's exactly it. Of course, in the US, we're a little bit more litigious, and we have been going at this for quite a while. The only part to EAA that I do find a little bit interesting is the ability to report for consumers, to report businesses, and to report websites for non-compliances. That's a little bit new. So, that would be the only other thing with EAA that I think is interesting. Yeah, I do remember hearing another fact about Northern Ireland. They're actually going to bring people to court, so directors of companies, and they're at danger of being in prison, which is the first time I've ever heard that. I heard that recently, so we have to go and vet that information. But that is obviously very serious and ramification for non-compliance. Let's hope we don't get to that point. But if we do, we have companies, of course, like Rio and Crown Peak that are here to support you throughout this process. As I said and mentioned, we will follow up on the questions that we were not able to answer. But I do just want to thank everyone for joining today. We really appreciate your time. I know for myself, this is an incredibly important topic. I know that Thomas and I are both very passionate about this and really want to see companies succeed and create a digital accessibility program. Thomas, any closing remarks from your side? No, it's been great talking with you. It's gone by really quickly. It's been a really great discussion. So, thanks for inviting me onto this. Absolutely. And again, appreciate your continued partnership. And again, thank you everyone, and we will get the questions and the recordings sent out.