AI, data mining, and a host of other rapidly evolving technologies are making it easier to share information. But innovation often outpaces accessibility, and people with visual impairments and other disabilities can’t always access the information they need.
Smartsheet, an AI-powered enterprise work management platform, wants to help change that with its Design-A11y (pronounced ally) software. Design-A11y alerts a user who is creating an information dashboard when a design element will be difficult for someone with color-blindness or another visual impairment to see, and it provides a one-click solution to make the information more accessible.
“What looks super cool to someone designing a dashboard might not make sense to everyone because the text is camouflaged by the background colors,” says Smartsheet’s director of product design Dilip Jagadesh, who came up with the idea for Design-A11y. “We put a smart guardrail into the experience to review anything and everything that a designer adds to the dashboard.”
Smartsheet is also exploring how the concept behind Design-A11y might be extended to other applications and be adapted to help people with other disabilities. The company’s commitment to making information more accessible earned Smartsheet a 2024 Innovation by Design award from Fast Company.
EXPANDING OPPORTUNITIES
As a designer is creating a dashboard, Design-A11y compares design elements such as text, background colors, and font size with current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, a set of standardized recommendations issued by the World Wide Web Consortium. Design-A11y also creates alt-text descriptions of images and charts so people using screen readers can understand the content. The technology serves as a kind of design spell-check, allowing users unfamiliar with the nuances of design to make their dashboards accessible.
Smartsheet is developing Design-A11y modularly, rather than as a single prototype, so its components can be used in a wide variety of design situations. The idea is to expand the technology’s capabilities across the development of internal portals, forms, documents, and entire brand platforms. In addition, AI capabilities will allow users to ask questions about the information they’re exploring to help them understand its meaning.
“Our solution not only solves for an individual who is color blind, but it also solves for someone who doesn’t understand the data visualization,” Jagadesh says.
BREAKTHROUGH DEVELOPMENT
Design-A11y emerged from Smartsheet’s annual hackathon, where members of the product development team set aside other commitments for a week to focus on realizing a particular passion project or solving a vexing problem. Product designers, product managers, and engineers come together to brainstorm solutions and think through the impact these innovations could have.
Jagadesh is dyslexic, which has sensitized him to the needs of people with disabilities, and he used the hackathon as an opportunity to address urgent accessibility needs. When his idea was identified as a promising product development opportunity, he and a team of designers and engineers set to work on creating software that could detect factors like brightness and contrast ratio and suggest accessibility solutions in real time. They then used user feedback to refine the tool, making sure it accounted for a wide spectrum of accessibility needs. “I have firsthand experience of how technology and accessible designs can significantly change how you operate,” Jagadesh says. “I believe that using technology to solve some of these problems will unlock all sorts of human possibilities.”