Fable has earned a reputation as the go-to startup for helping companies develop digital products that are more accessible to people with disabilities. After raising $25 million in new funding, the Toronto-based startup is now working to expand the community it supports and make its AI training data more inclusive.
Fable was launched in 2020 as an easier way to reach out to accessibility experts and people with disabilities. This ensures that anyone building a product has the best advice to make it as accessible as possible. Since our A round two years later, we've built a more robust product offering with content, tests, and tools that integrate more directly with developer workflows.
“Accessibility is no longer just the responsibility of accessibility professionals and product managers; it is now shifting to everyone involved in the product development process, including researchers, designers, product managers, and engineers,” said CEO and Co-Founder. Alwar Pillai said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Historically, it's been a separate group taking responsibility and doing the work. Now they're sharing responsibility and responsibility, and Fable is a platform that allows them to do it themselves. is.”
Companies that build and maintain large platforms have come to terms with the fact that they can't add accessibility at the end like Salt Bae. It should be built in from the beginning. And making a product better for people with disabilities usually makes it better for others.
Fable initially got off to a good start with support for his visual and motor disabilities, Pillai explained.
Fable CEO Alwar PillaiImage credit:Fable
“We wanted to find a way that companies could feel comfortable engaging with this population, because this population has historically been excluded, and these are people who are a little more familiar to organizations. Over time, we have observed several trends within our customer base, so now is the right time to expand our community to represent people with cognitive and hearing impairments. I decided it was time.”
She pointed out that one in six people has some kind of disability, but not all of them are visible or even have a disability that people mention. User experience includes many assumptions about what users can see, hear, do, and understand. For example, if you don't have someone on your testing team who is deaf or dyslexic, it's not always easy to find and improve them.
“If we can gain insights from these communities, we can ultimately create products that work well for everyone. However, it has historically been difficult for companies to easily and on-demand engage with this community.” That's where Fable steps in,” she said.
Fable has been building assessment and advisory tools for many years. So product managers and engineers can track accessibility like any other standard feature or quality milestone.
An emerging technology area that deserves special attention, and one that Fable hopes to improve, is the data that powers AI models. Data bias translates into model bias, which applies to people with disabilities just as it does to other categories.
One reason for this is that these AI models tend to aim most aggressively at the average answer or response, the center of the bell curve. However, people with disabilities tend to fall outside of that average need and experience.
“We are excited about the proliferation of AI, but we are also cautious. There is a huge opportunity to improve the experience of people with disabilities,” Pillai said. “But at the same time, it has the potential to widen the digital divide that exists. We see AI being built into so many things, but people with disabilities are not being considered and are likely not being collected. Because the data is small and excluded from larger models, AI is thought to have the ability to: be excluded for that reason. “
This can be alleviated through fine-tuning and quick engineering, but it is not enough. The model necessarily comes from the dataset it was trained on, so if the disability isn't well represented there, and it isn't, then the model just isn't accessible. Fable has been working with the community, as well as researchers and governments, to create resources and best practices.
“Our goal is to be able to deploy these comprehensive datasets in the near future and provide testing for accessibility in AI. Our customers are already coming to us for that. ,” Pillai said.
As always, she emphasized that incorporating these methods into a company's own development process is empowering; Fable does not do the work for them.
“Our platform has become a dashboard where we can monitor all our digital assets and products against accessibility metrics. We wanted to bring insights and data to the products that our product teams use on a daily basis. We invested in integration,” says Pillai. “We've gone from just being able to get one insight to actually looking at how different products are performing. If you think about enterprises, they have over 500 digital products. Their goal is how can they know if they're getting better? And finally, they have metrics to prove it.
The $25 million B round, led by Five Elms Capital, will go toward launching a new team and product centered around expertise in cognitive and hearing impairments, and of course, AI. Pillai said that although the investment environment is not as open as it was a few years ago, he was pleasantly surprised during the fundraising process.
“It was very different from the last few fundraisings,” Pillai recalls. “When we raised Seed and Series A, I remember trying to convince investors about the opportunity in the accessibility space. But this time, investors had a very strong understanding of the space, the growth opportunity. It was more about how much value we were adding to our customers and how we were growing. I think that was what stood out.”