The Joomla project has been awarded a significant investment from the Sovereign Tech Fund to deliver a structured 20-month accessibility programme. This programme will further strengthen Joomla's position as one of the world's most accessible content management systems.

What is the Sovereign Tech Fund?

It is a program under the Sovereign Tech Agency that invests in open source software to strengthen open digital infrastructure for security, innovation, and digital sovereignty.  Its decision to invest in Joomla represents significant recognition of the project's importance within the global open-source ecosystem and provides a strong foundation for Joomla's continued growth and sustainability in the years ahead.

How is the program organised?

To management the program from the Joomla side we have two project managers:

Cynthia Shelly

Cynthia Shelly is an accessibility consultant based in Amsterdam. She has worked in accessibility for over 25 years, in many different roles including strategy, program management and engineering leadership. Throughout that time, she contributed to w3c accessibility standards, including WCAG 2.0 and ARIA. As part of the team that built Microsoft’s accessibility program, she owned company strategy for developer tools and platforms. Cynthia built a digital accessibility program from scratch for Starbucks Mobile Order and Pay. She has worked on multiple browsers, including driving the accessibility program for Chrome and ChromeOS at Google. Cynthia has a special interest in accessibility for authoring and development tools, and their impact on both the websites and apps built with them, and on the employability of people with disabilities. She is excited to contribute that knowledge to the Joomla open source community. She will be focused on project management, reporting on the project to OSM and STF, and coordinating with contractors about accessibility requirements.

Robert Deutz

A long time community member back to the beginning of the project, former President, CMS Maintenance Team lead and organised many events like JandBeyond and the first Joomla World Conference. He is a PHP developer and business owner for almost 25 years, co-founded BackupMonkey and developed many business specific extensions for Joomla. 

Robert will focus on community involvement and information. He will prepare the RFP and work closely with the selection committee to find the right people to do the job. Within the time contractors work on the project he will support the contractors to be effective and not spend too much time in fulfilling the Joomla process requirements.

Project Organisation

For the 20 months time we have defined 19 projects with milestones to reach. Each project has specific goals and results we are expecting to achieve. Details about the projects will be published on the OSM Website under Projects. Anyone can apply for a project and the work is paid when the milestones are reached.

Selection committee

This committee will make the milestone award decisions for work funded through the Sovereign Tech Fund. Anyone can apply for the committee. The current call states that applicants must be "not applying to be a project manager or for any milestone through this 20-month STF project." We're discussing changing this so that committee members would only be excluded from reviewing milestones they have applied for themselves, rather than being excluded entirely.

Project M1a - Audit and Baseline Metrics

The program was started on the 1st July and the team is working to achieve the goals for the first project M1a - Audit and Baseline Metrics. This is the foundation project of the entire programme. Its outputs will define the evidence base, test protocols, and acceptance criteria that all subsequent projects depend on. The contractor for this milestone is an independent external accessibility specialist with no prior vested interest in Joomla's current conformance claims. We are very happy that we have Axess Lab, Sweden on board.

About Axess Lab

Since 2014, Axess Lab has supported clients to make their websites, apps, and physical products accessible for people with disabilities. About 25 specialists cover all the relevant dimensions of a successful accessibility program: strategy, auditing, design, engineering, user research, and organisational enablement. We help organisations to be compliant with accessibility requirements and laws while building long-term capabilities. This leads to organisations becoming increasingly self-sufficient through our practical guidance, knowledge transfer, and sustainable accessibility practices.

“This project is exciting for us at Axess Lab because we believe in the transformative power of everyone being able to contribute to the information on the web. Accessible CMS play a significant part to unleash that potential”, says Eric Eggert, Principal Accessibility Specialist at Axess Lab. He has worked in accessibility for almost 20 years, including working with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on educational materials for the international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standard and with the US non-profit Knowbility. The main focus of the 6-person Axess Lab team, apart from making the user interfaces accessible, will be to ensure a reliable baseline of the further milestones in the project.

State of the project

There is not so much to report at this stage but all are set up and are motivated.

We plan to give you regular updates and reports on the magazine.