Adobe Accessibility Product Manager Talks AI And Accessibility, Building Responsible AI In Interview

Adobe is using AI across many of its technologies for accessibility.

Adobe

Count Mary Ann Jawili as bullish on AI’s prospects in the long term.

Jawili, affectionately known as MJ to those who know her, serves as Adobe’s accessibility product manager on the San Jose-based company’s accessibility team. Jawili, whose responsibilities include working with teams across the organization on how best to incorporate accessibility into software development, recently connected with me via email to discuss her bullishness on artificial intelligence and much more.

Regular readers of the column no doubt know Adobe has been a main character in this space’s storyline since the very beginning. The company cares deeply about accessibility and promoting disability inclusion, with Jawili telling me when it comes to the meteoric rise of AI that she believes it “presents tremendous opportunities for helping people with disabilities” by augmenting the experiences they have with technology and “enable them to do what was previously difficult or impossible.” For creators, she added, AI helps them make their content more empathetic and inclusive by providing auto-generated captions and transcripts, as well as tagging PDF documents. In a broader scope, Jawili said AI can help disabled people become fuller participants in society, ultimately building “a more inclusive and trustworthy digital space for everyone.”

To illustrate that last point, Jawili explained Adobe’s accessibility group closely collaborates with their colleagues on the AI ethics and product equity teams in an effort to “define requirements for training and testing data so that our models more accurately depict people with disabilities in a way that is not harmful.” She believes many of Adobe’s “biggest opportunities” as they work to responsibly build AI lie in removing barriers to technology and preventing harmful bias. AI, Jawili told me, is “only as good as the data it’s trained on” while adding datasets historically have included “very few data points representing use cases involving disability status” and caveating that “disability-relevant data points are often not representative of how disability is manifested in the real world.” Even the best data can be riddled with bad information that can “perpetuate stereotypes or produce results that are inaccurate.”

“This is why we have feedback systems that are carefully designed,” Jawili said of Adobe’s vigilance towards building AI tools. “They are discoverable and useful without being overwhelming for people.”

As to Adobe’s ethos on product development, Jawili said accessibility is part and parcel of the process. She said the company spends a lot of time ruminating over “how to integrate and enhance the accessibility of those tools” before a product is brought to life. Moreover, Jawili said Adobe is helped on this journey by what she characterized as a “strong foundation of accessibility” that is a major contributor to have they build stuff like AI technologies. She added the company applies said knowledge, along with best practices like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to create generative AI which is “dynamic and information-rich.”

Jawili pointed to her team’s work with the Creative Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Document Cloud teams as one example, telling me the overarching goal is to “establish digital accessibility and inclusion as a deeper mindset throughout our company to promote and advance accessibility-related innovations.” As it pertains to AI, Jawili said Adobe is a firm believer in the notion that the UI is the “key component” to the experience because the interface is the conduit through which users interact with the tool(s). As such, Jawili noted it’s her team’s job to “identify requirements and techniques for making generated content accessible” such as including alt-text for imagery and a semantic structure and organization for text. Other examples can be seen in Adobe Firefly and Adobe Experience Platform, according to Jawili.

Jawili shared the aforementioned product equity team held a workshop with disability rights organization Speaking for Ourselves during which attendees learned how to “build more equitable product experiences through community co-creation.” Accessibility features, she told me, “help increase inclusion so people with disabilities can experience these tools and their outputs with power, precision, and ease of use.”

“When we intentionally build our products to be more accessible, the outcome is a better experience for everyone,” Jawili said. “We will continue to create solutions and processes that can address the needs and aspirations of diverse communities.”

When asked about feedback from people on Adobe’s work in melding AI and accessibility, Jawili reiterated her earlier point about generative AI being transformative for disabled people, saying the reception has been “generally positive from this community of stakeholders.” She added results of a recent study done internally revealed creatives with disability use generative AI “more frequently” than those without disabilities. To this end, Jawili cited the text-to-image and generative fill features in Firefly enable disabled people to more accessibly create and edit imagery. Likewise, Blind and low vision creatives can use “simple verbal prompts” to create any image their imagination conjures up. And for people with motor disabilities, generative fill can be controlled using eye gaze or dictation to more easily replace an image’s background.

Looking towards the future, Jawili said once again that AI is a rapidly-evolving technology that has the potential to vastly improve digital accessibility. She added while the principal goal always has been, and will continue, to first and foremost serve disabled people, can benefit everyone regardless of their ability status. Jawili cautioned, however, that AI isn’t perfect and, so content created with it “must be reviewed” before one proceeds to shares their work with the wider world.

“We [at Adobe] have a unique opportunity to integrate our learnings and experiences to create and deploy technology that improves the lives of more people around the world,” Jawili said.

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