If you just finished an accessibility audit and fixed every finding, is your organization now "safe" for the next product you ship? Often, the answer is no. An audit tells you what's wrong with one product at one point in time. What it doesn't tell you is the more important question: does your organization actually have a system in place to keep producing accessible products, or will the same issues just resurface in the next one?

That's the question the Accessibility Maturity Model (AMM) is designed to answer.

What the Accessibility Maturity Model is

The AMM is a framework developed by the W3C — the same organization behind WCAG — to help organizations measure how mature their accessibility practices are, not at the level of a single product, but across the organization as a whole.

The underlying idea is simple: most organizations already have mature governance systems for things like data security or product quality. Accessibility, on the other hand, often remains an individual effort, driven by one or two people who happen to care, rather than something built into how the organization consistently operates. The AMM helps identify how far accessibility has (or hasn't) actually been embedded into your organization's everyday way of working.

The seven dimensions it measures

The AMM organizes organizational accessibility maturity into seven dimensions:

  • Culture — whether accessibility is treated as a shared responsibility across the organization, or just something one small team happens to care about.
  • Communications — whether there's consistent messaging about why accessibility matters, both internally across teams and externally to users, for example through a published accessibility statement.
  • Knowledge and skills — whether design, development, and content teams have enough practical understanding and skill to act on accessibility, not just awareness of it.
  • Personnel — whether there are clear roles and responsibilities tied to accessibility, rather than it being whoever happens to be available.
  • Procurement — whether accessibility is actually a criterion when selecting vendors, software, or third-party tools.
  • ICT development life cycle — whether accessibility is considered from the design and planning stage, or only bolted on as a "fix" near the end once the product is nearly done.
  • Support — whether there's a clear mechanism to help users with disabilities who run into problems, such as a dedicated support channel or alternative formats.

These seven dimensions are interconnected. An organization that's strong in one dimension but weak in another will usually still struggle to sustain its accessibility outcomes over time.

Four maturity levels

For each dimension, the AMM defines four maturity levels, like rungs on a ladder the organization climbs over time.

The earliest level is when the organization has little to no awareness or formal recognition that accessibility matters. The next level is when that need has been recognized and some effort is underway, though it's still ad hoc and not yet structured. The level after that is when there's a clear plan in place and it's actively being executed. The most mature level is when accessibility is genuinely embedded into how the organization works, regularly evaluated, and continuously refined.

It's worth noting that most organizations aren't at the same level across all seven dimensions. It's entirely normal for an organization to be fairly mature in, say, team knowledge, while still being at an early stage in vendor procurement. That's actually where the AMM adds the most value: it gives you the full picture, not just one slice of it.

How it's different from an accessibility audit

This question comes up often, so it's worth being precise about it: the AMM and an accessibility audit answer different questions, and they complement each other rather than replace one another.

An accessibility audit answers "does this specific digital product, right now, have concrete accessibility barriers?" The output is a set of technical findings you can act on directly. The AMM answers "does our organization have the capacity and systems to keep producing accessible products, even after this audit is done?" The output is a picture of organizational capacity, not a bug list.

Organizations that only fix audit findings without ever addressing the underlying system tend to run into the same problems again on their next product, because the root cause, the way the organization actually works, was never really touched.

How to start measuring your organization's maturity

The W3C provides the AMM as a detailed narrative document with an accompanying spreadsheet, which is thorough but also fairly time-consuming to fill out from scratch.

We've adapted this framework into our own Accessibility Maturity Assessment, a shorter version that takes about 10-15 minutes to complete. You'll answer a set of questions covering all seven dimensions, and at the end you'll get an overall score along with a breakdown by dimension, something you can use directly as a starting point for an internal conversation with your team.

Once you know where your organization currently stands, the next step we most often recommend is sitting down with our consulting team to translate that result into a concrete, realistic plan, one shaped around your organization's actual capacity and priorities, rather than a generic plan that looks the same for everyone.

Measuring organizational maturity can feel less tangible than a list of bugs from an audit. But that's exactly the point: this isn't about fixing one product. It's about making sure every product you build after this one has a much better shot at being accessible from the start.