14ten Deaf-first accessibility governance
14ten

Why now

Accessibility is moving from feature-level decisions to system-level accountability.

Three forces make Part 14 implementation (and proof) urgent:

  1. AI mediation is exploding — captions, summaries, agentive call flows, and automated decisioning now sit inside communications products.
  2. Systems are becoming more distributed — mobile, web, conferencing, identity, delegation, and third‑party integrations create “unknown edges.”
  3. Recordkeeping expectations are rising — regulated buyers increasingly need defensible evidence, not marketing claims.

14ten exists to make that shift tractable: signals → rules → evidence → assertions.

Market pull (what buyers already want)

Regulated organizations and large platforms are converging on the same ask:

  • “Show me how you know accessibility worked — in the real world — across devices and contexts.”
  • “Make it auditable without a hero engineer.”
  • “Give me repeatability I can scale across products.”

14ten translates this into a durable operating model:

  • A common language for accessibility events (discrete, immutable signals).
  • A deterministic decision layer (rules with traceability).
  • A recordkeeping output (persisted evidence + audit-ready assertions).

Wedge → expansion (GTM that fits the reality)

14ten is intentionally not a single product. The go-to-market path is:

  1. Wedge: one high-stakes workflow (e.g., conferencing, contact center, telehealth, customer support communications).
  2. Proof: ship evidence + assertions that map cleanly to Part 14 outcomes.
  3. Expand: reuse the same primitives across adjacent workflows and product lines.

This is how “frameworks” win: once the evidence model is adopted, it becomes the default.

Moat (why this isn’t a checklist)

14ten’s defensibility comes from the structure, not the copy:

  • Event taxonomy + envelope discipline: consistent semantics, provenance, and integrity.
  • Determinism + traceability: decisions are explainable and replayable.
  • Recordkeeping by design: evidence is produced as a first-class system output.
  • Deaf-first correctness: lived experience shapes what gets measured (and what “worked” actually means).

This is hard to imitate because it requires cross-domain rigor: policy, systems engineering, and accessibility practice.

Salesforce-native path (how 14ten becomes a platform layer)

The cleanest path to adoption is to express 14ten as Salesforce-native primitives:

1) Objects (data model)

  • Signal__c: the discrete event (caption started, speaker identified, UI state changed, error surfaced).
  • Envelope__c: provenance + integrity wrapper (device, session, version, timestamps, actor, consent context).
  • Evidence__c: persisted artifact pointers (logs, transcripts, media references, test runs).
  • Assertion__c: computed, audit-ready claim derived from evidence (including rule version + inputs).

2) Deterministic rules

  • Flow / Apex / Rules Engine to compute state and produce assertions.
  • Store rule versions and dependencies so assertions are replayable.

3) Dashboards buyers already understand

  • Compliance posture by product/workflow, device class, and environment.
  • Coverage gaps (where signals are missing).
  • Incident review (evidence trail from user report → system signals → assertion results).

4) Distribution

  • Nonprofit Cloud / Government Cloud: governance and reporting that fits regulated operations.
  • Service Cloud: case-based accessibility incidents with attached evidence trails.
  • Slack: evidence “snapshots” for incident response and ops.

What a pilot looks like

In 30–60 days, a credible pilot can:

  1. Instrument a single workflow to emit signals.
  2. Persist evidence (logs/transcripts) with provenance.
  3. Generate a small set of assertions mapping to Part 14 outcomes.
  4. Deliver a dashboard that makes gaps obvious.

The win condition is not “we built captions.” It is: we can prove what happened, when, for whom, on what device, under what constraints.

If you’re evaluating this as Salesforce Ventures

14ten is a trust primitive for accessibility — positioned the way Salesforce likes:

  • Upstream of many products
  • Native to governance + reporting
  • Naturally enterprise‑shaped
  • Aligned with mission and regulatory reality

If you want to go deeper, see the architecture model and evidence outputs: