Experts of Experience - #21 Accessibility in Focus: Fable's CEO Talks Design and Impact

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

On this episode, Lauren interviews Alwar Pillai, the CEO and Co-founder of Fable, a company that helps organizations build accessible and inclusive technology. They discuss the importance of accessibility in technology and the challenges of building inclusive products. They also explore the role of design in accessibility and the impact of inclusive design on user experience. Plus, Alwar emphasizes the competitive advantage of accessibility and the importance of serving the largest untapped consumer segment in the world - people with disabilities.Tune in to learn:The Importance of Accessibility in TechnologyThe Key People Being Left Out in Digital ProductsThe Challenges of Building Inclusive TechnologyCreating Inspiration and Shifting PerspectivesThe Role of Design in AccessibilityThe Impact of Inclusive Design on User ExperienceAdvice for Customer Experience LeadersThe Importance of Internal Culture–Imagine running your business with a trusted advisor who has your success top of mind. That’s what it’s like when you have a Salesforce Success Plan. With the right plan, Salesforce is with you through every stage of your journey — from onboarding, to realizing business outcomes, to driving efficient growth. Learn more about what’s possible on the Salesforce success plan website.  Mission.org is a media studio producing content for world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

People with disabilities are the largest untapped consumer segment in the world. There's been some really interesting work done recently that showed that it's tech companies that are investing in disability and diversity and they're actually also seeing a higher return on profitability. For businesses that are trying to broaden their user base this should be an exciting opportunity to go after a segment that needs to be served. And if you serve them right, you are building the strongest, most loyal customer base that's out there. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood.

And today I'm speaking with Alwar Pillai, the CEO and co-founder of Fable, an accessibility platform helping enterprises build inclusive digital products. Fable works with top organizations to not only address compliance, but also to build user experiences that make products more accessible to over 1 billion people worldwide who live with disabilities. Fable has won multiple awards, including ranking number five on Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2023 list. Previous to Fable, Alvar worked as a manager of accessibility at Rogers Communications, and she is without a doubt a leading expert in technological accessibility. And today, we're going to dive

into how organizations can adopt an accessibility mindset and create products that truly can be used by everyone. Alwar, so wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for having me, Lauren. So I've heard you say in some of your other interviews that the way that we build products is broken. I'd love to understand your opinion here on what is broken about the way that we build products is broken. I'd love to understand your opinion here on what is broken about the way that we're building tech today. Yes, I do. I do say that often. And it is true. The way digital teams and product teams build products nowadays are broken. And the reason behind it, it's not intentional. It's part of people not being aware. So if you look at most

digital teams nowadays, it is made up of people who are able-bodied, who are majority probably people under 45. And they're designing experiences that pretty much a lot of people across the globe use. And the problem is because that the people who are building the products don't represent entirely the people who use your products. And as an individual, you tend to think of your needs first and then design based on that. And this becomes a problem if most digital teams don't have anyone with a disability. How are the needs of people with disabilities considered when designing products so that they can take advantage of it? So we think there needs to be exposure to

diverse feedback, diverse insights to truly make products work for everyone. And the other thing I would say is the digital world has so much opportunity to be more inclusive than the physical world. But simple UI implementations can really cause digital segregation and digital divide. And so what I mean by that is think of someone who was blind, who just wants to order pizza at home. And I'm not sure if you live with a disability or not, but someone with able-bodied can easily go online, order it, and it will be delivered. But for someone with a disability, they need to think about, is that site accessible? Is the payment accessible? And that's when they can take

advantage of that service. So we have a huge opportunity here. It's a technical problem that can easily be solved with the right amount of awareness and training and practice. And so when you think about the companies who are implementing a more accessible platform, how do you see a competitive advantage at play there? I mean, of course, we want to be more inclusive. We want to create products that companies or that anyone can access, just like we would, you know, adding a wheelchair ramp into our stores. But in a technological world, I don't think it's as obvious sometimes.

And I'd love to kind of paint the picture for companies as to why they should be investing in technology that is more accessible to a broader audience. The reason to invest, there are so many. And I think the first one starts with just the number of people who need accessibility accommodations. The UN has reported that about 15% of the world population that meets over a billion people with disabilities across the world. If you look at the aging population, people who are about the age of 60 are twice as likely to experience disability than any other segment. So from a population standpoint, people with disabilities are the largest untapped consumer segment in the world. And for businesses that are trying to broaden their user base, are dealing with saturated user bases, this should be an exciting opportunity to go after a

segment that needs to be served. And if you serve them right, you are building the strongest, most loyal customer base that's out there. The other thing is there are other reasons where organizations are investing in this, but it all leads to the one that I just there. The other thing is there are other reasons where organizations are investing in this, but it all leads to the one that I just mentioned. You do have legislation in place that are mandating organizations to be accessible. There are lawsuits related to accessibility, but all of that boils down to the fact that people with disabilities are not able to take advantage of what's available digitally, like everyone who is able-bodied. And you mentioned, right, when you think about a physical space, yeah, you can implement a ramp for a wheelchair,

you can have an accessible washroom. Those are important. They take much more time to invest, but when it comes digitally, you have a much more easier way to tap into the segment. And we're talking about doing everything online now, whether that's banking, working, social, the number of applications we all use on a daily basis is quite high. And I think this is a true opportunity for companies to really start serving this user base in a way that helps them participate in the digital world. Mm-hmm. I love what you're saying about how, I mean, with digital products, we can actually do so much to create accessibility, more so than we would in the physical world. And I'd love to understand a little bit about, you know, who are the key people that you

feel are really being left out right now in digital products? I don't think it's one specific segment of people with disabilities. I think the level of inclusive experiences varies based on disabilities. And the way we like to see it in Fable is what are the assistive technologies that people with disabilities use to access their computers and in turn access the digital world? So someone who's blind will use something called a screen reader. Someone with low vision will use magnification software. Someone with, you know, severe motor impairments might use speech-to-text software. So they have technologies that they use that are plugged into their computers and devices that help them use their computers and, in turn,

the digital world. What we are trying to do is making sure that the products that enterprises and corporates are building are compatible with the tools that people with disabilities use. And that's what's going to be the initial layer of creating an accessible experience. But Alwar, I'm curious to understand what inspired you to start Fable? I feel like I was like destined to being the founder, co-founder and CEO of Fable. And so what inspired me to get into digital accessibility

was when I did my master's in inclusive design at OCAD University. I'd already done my UX degree. I'd already worked in the field and I wanted to further improve user experience. And that's why I did this master's program. And this master's program truly opened up my perspective of how diverse users are. And so I did a study during my master's program where I was analyzing how people over the age of 65 who have mild cognitive impairments interact with social applications. And so I would go to senior homes every Saturday and spend time with seniors and observe them using an iPad for just, you know, socially engaging with

their friends and family to an application. And as I was observing them, it just screamed out to me, all these UI, UX decisions that, you know, we make as product teams and we think, well, this is such a sleek design. This is such a clean, minimal UI design, but I'm watching people who have tremors, who easily forget where some things are. And when I watched that, it was so obvious to me some of the world of digital accessibility and understood the problem from a user perspective. And then I went on to Rogers, helping them with their accessibility practice. And that's when I understood the challenge from a business perspective. Why is it challenging for companies to build accessible products? What are we doing in our process that's broken?

And it was very evident that we didn't have anyone with a disability around. We didn't have the voices of people with disabilities. We were making assumptions based on compliance requirements. We were looking at it as a checklist, but not really understanding why that checklist existed. to really help teams broaden their perspective of UX and understand that everyone's different and you need to approach it as one size does not fit all, approach it as one size fits one. And through that, you're actually going to create the most adaptable, usable, customizable, personalized experience for everyone that you serve.

And that's what led me to co-found Fable with Abid Virani. And so how does Fable really support this mission of creating accessibility? So the way we support it is by bringing the voices of people with disabilities into the product development processes that large enterprises practice. We make it really easy for product teams to engage with people with disabilities online and on demand to get insights from them on their products, whether that is early stages of research, ideation, design, or it's post that where you're developing, launching, and maintaining your product. We make it really easy to get the right insights at the right time so you can act on it and match it to your agile product development

process. We also help organization truly practice inclusive product development. And that's a combination of having the right insights at the right time. It's having the right skills and training as well. We also provide training to customers and we do custom training based on the roles and technologies that enterprises use internally. We think that each enterprise organizes themselves uniquely and that the training should be complementary to your process. And we do all of this with the voices of people with disabilities at the center of it. So at a much higher level, we're facilitating behavioral change within an organization

in the way they see their users and then in turn how they tend to support these users. Can you give me an example of how you're really creating that behavioral change. I think it's such an interesting approach to helping organizations adopt a new approach to technology. You're not only providing them with insights, but you're really going in and shifting the way that these product teams are thinking. And I'd love to just understand like an example of how you've done this within an organization

so we can really paint a picture. We have this thing internally that we call aha moments and whether that's our customer experience team or product team, we'll just share these moments that our customers are experiencing when they engage with our testers with disabilities. And this is a moment where someone who is in a product or customer experience or engineering team

watching someone with a disability struggling to use a product that they built. And this happens for us either in the sales process or even when our customers are using our products and getting these insights. And it's one, it's a moment of a little bit of embarrassment of this is so painful to watch. And the second is like, I can so easily fix this. It goes from like zero to a hundred really quickly where someone's like so embarrassed, like, oh, why did we do this? To let me just like put in some code right now and fix that problem. And we've had that in some use that happened on our product where we would have someone from an engineering team and research team watch a tester with a disability go through

a task flow and see that they're struggling and then immediately make that change. And I think that's that moment where for us, it's like there's a shift that's happened for an individual because now they have a broader perspective of something they didn't have before. We had this thing happen much earlier when we started Fable as well. We were just building our version or a prototype of our product. And we were just hired a couple of developers to help us build that out. And as part of that process, we had to teach them how to build it accessibly. And the developers sent us a note,s leader, like with a meme of someone like pulling their hair apart, saying, I can't stop seeing accessibility issues. Everywhere I look now, every website I go, I'm just seeing accessibility issues. And that's what I mean by

that behavioral change. It's the goal is to get product teams and customer experience teams excited to solve problems that end users are experiencing, get excited to serve a base that they've never served before. You're not going to do it by saying, you have to do it. This is a mandate. Here's the list of 100 compliance requirements that we have to adhere to. You're going to get it by getting them excited about the problem. And I think that's what we do really well, where we help demystify accessibility and focus on the core issue and empower product teams to really go after solving them.

I'd love to understand a little bit more about how you're actually creating that inspiration within the product teams you're working with. I know you just mentioned having them actually experience it through the eyes of someone with a disability. What does that really look like? And I think it's something I really want to dive into because there's so many product teams and I've worked with so many of them myself where I've never had this conversation of accessibility with my product teams. And just this conversation that we're having, I'm like, whoa, we need to be

thinking about this more. So what are some of the ways that you really go in and help create that inspiration and have people see things from a different lens? Yeah, no, that's a great question. And it's hard. It is a long journey. And we do tell our customers that, you know, Accessibility Laws have existed for a long time, but we focus on serving enterprises. So these are organizations that are making, you know, over at least a minimum of $10 billion in revenue, have multiple products across the world, are serving millions, if not billions of users. So their internal processes are complicated. And it's going to take time to introduce any kind of change. And what we focus on is a notion of learning and practicing. And so when companies engage with Fable,

the first is the learning bit. We need to help them understand the real problems. So a lot of the work that the teams that we work with will do primarily is helping them socialize accessibility from this lens. It's nothing more. We're not asking people to make any changes. We're not giving them additional work. We're just saying here's a problem. We just want you to be aware of it. You need to give that time and space to breathe. And then once we do that, and once people see the problem, and once they see it in a manner that they know how to solve the problem, so you're not just coming to them with, here's like 200 bug compliance fixes that you need to solve in 20 days. It's saying, here are some experiences that we need to address, but here's the problem,

and it's well within our scope. And then slowly we get into this habit of practicing, because our goal is not to have companies just try to do accessibility as a one-time fix. It'll always be a failure. You will never be fully accessible. It'll be a waste of resources. And the only way you can do it is integrate it into your process. So we build opportunity for practicing accessibility. So a few teams will take on insights. They'll figure out how can they, on a regular basis, start to do this. So with one of our customers, what we did was initially they had separate research that they would run just in relation to accessibility. And over a period of time, they mandated that every research that they run has to include insights from the

disability community. That took time, but now it changed a practice internally where now they're making sure that any insights that they run includes the voices of people with disabilities. The next step is how do we get this beyond the research team to the design team and product team? So we believe in the practice of inclusive product development, and we know that it takes a lot of time to learn and practice, and it requires a lot of support from obviously the people who are part of these teams, and also from leadership to give them space to learn and practice and not just have deadlines. And I think when you see that combination of the space given to practice and also the opportunity to learn, we see a lot of organizations succeeding.

You alluded a little bit to the size of your clients. And I just wanted to highlight for our listeners who you're really working with. I mean, some of the clients that you're working with are Meta, Shopify, Slack. I know you've done a partnership with Microsoft. You're working with some of the largest organizations in tech. I'm curious, what drove them to come to you? What was the problem that many of these companies have been trying to solve by working with Fable? We love our customers.

We love that they've chosen to partner with us and take on this initiative of building inclusive experiences. And the primary reason enterprises come to us is because pretty much every enterprise that we work with have tried accessibility before, and I would say failed at doing it. They've spent a lot of resources, and they've not seen their products actually improve in terms of the experience that end users are experiencing. And so when organizations are coming to us is that they've done compliance, they've done the automated testing, they're not seeing it move the needle. And now they're really looking for that

validation from people with disabilities. And that's what's giving them confidence in if their products are improving or not. And so one of the things that we've done is we've actually introduced different ways of measuring accessibility. When we entered the market five years ago, it was purely only compliance. That was the only measurement. And the problem with compliance is you can never be fully compliant with a number of lists that you have. And the reason companies are getting sued is not because you're not compliant, it's because your product is not usable for an end user with a number of lists that you have. And the reason companies are getting sued is not because you're not compliant,

it's because your product is not usable for an end user with a disability. And so what we did was, how do we make it easier for companies to really measure if their products are usable for people with disabilities? And we introduced the accessible usability scale as a way of measuring the usability

from the perspective of a person with a disability. Because we recognize that a lot of the usability metrics that are out there are for general population, and a lot of their questions are biased and will not capture the experiences of people with disabilities in the most appropriate way. And so we have this AUS score now. And so each customer can really know how is the experience for people with various assistive technology. And they have a quantifiable metric that they can revisit every quarter, every year to see if they're making progress or not. And our customers have included these scores in their product health scores. So it's not standalone anymore. It's

part of their process. And so these are the reasons why customers are coming to us is because they are shifting away from compliance. They're shifting left. They see the benefits of inclusive product development and the value of engaging with people with disabilities. And at Fable, we just make that whole process as frictionless as possible. Why is creating accessible products so hard for organizations? Well, if you have to think about Meta and Microsoft, like these are large organizations.

They have multiple products that are used by billions of people. They are pushing code every single day. They are making changes to their products every single day. They have a huge design system, code system, and there are so many people touching the code. So not everyone knows the accessibility requirements. Not everyone has the accessibility skills. So how do you make this process simple? Because companies have been reactive before where they've shipped the

product and then they've tried to do remediation to make sure it's accessible, but they know that doesn't work. But at the pace in which product development is happening right now, to consider accessibility requirements and ship it with it is challenging. And what we're doing is let's break it down to user level requirements so that it's easy for every business unit, every product team to start integrating accessibility. And that's why it's a combination of learning and practicing.

When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is not an option. At Salesforce, they get it. They've made their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, available to help you with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of your journey. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. I'd love to also talk about the successability score that you mentioned. And it's so great to hear that product teams are actually including that in their own KPIs for success. Tell me a little bit more about what that score is measuring and how do you give them one score that then shows them here is your accessibility?

The EUS is very similar to the system usability scale that's existed for many years in the research space. And what we've done is the system usability scale has 10 questions that you ask a user at the end of an experience to evaluate how usable the experience was in their perspective. But some of these questions, the way they were framed, don't properly apply to people with disabilities. So one of it is, would you require a support from someone else to complete this experience? But from a person with a disability's perspective, is it someone like me or someone able-bodied? What are you referring to there? So we made tweaks to these questions so that it appropriately captures the need of people with disabilities and specifically people who use assistive technologies.

So is the experience same for someone who uses the screen reader? And so that anyone who else is using the screen reader, the experience could be similar. And so you answer those questions and through that, you get a score which dictates how accessible or usable your experience is based on the perspective of someone with a disability. And this is a great way for organizations now to know, are they meeting their own standards? You can set your own goal of where you want to be, but now at least there's a way for you to make incremental progress and improvements. And this is really key because before a school like this didn't exist. And the fact that now there's a way to quantify accessibility and integrate it to other benchmarks within an organization is part of the steps to integrating accessibility and practicing inclusive product

development. I remember early when I was speaking to one of our customers, executive champion, and asked them, what do you need? The team is actively trying to work on accessibility. What do you need to know that this is successful? And they just said, I've been spending millions every year and the report comes back to me with the same set of issues. So I don't know what the team is doing to improve it or not. With the scores like AUS and the completion scores that we have, now finally product teams have the right set of metrics to even go to the executives and show the state of accessibility within their products and to really actually

have those executive level conversations so that the investment in accessibility continues. It's really shining a light on what the issue is and where they can improve. Exactly. I know that you work with a community of testers with disabilities. And I'd love to understand how your involvement with that community is really influencing your approach to the development process and how you're working with that community and kind of bridging the gaps between the community and your clients. Yeah, Fables community is the core to everything that we offer. And when we started off, you know, we built a community first of people who are blind that use screen readers, and then we expanded it to people who have low vision and use magnification to then motor impairments. And we continue to grow our community to represent the different types of disabilities that people experience. And our engagement with our community has pretty much influenced every part of the organization. When it comes to our product, we designed methodologies that were unique, that would represent the needs of this community. So we co-designed the way you engage

with our community, whether that's in a moderated format or unmoderated format, that entire process involved getting their feedback in every step of the way to make that experience as seamless as possible. We have chosen to use specific tools because some tools are not accessible and we want to make sure our community can easily participate, share their feedback in the most frictionless way as possible. We've, you know, taken a lot of insights from our community in terms of, you know, the way we've built our team. I'm a big believer in if you're telling companies to practice inclusive product development, you need to be a company that practices it internally. And so, you know, we have people with disabilities in our team. Our processes are really different compared to

another startup at our stage because we've chosen to be more mature and have more mature practices because that's what helps building an inclusive team. And so it's hard to pin down like this is like the one value that we've gotten out of our community because I feel like it's a thread that's just woven across every part of the business from our brand to how we engage with our customers, how we educate our customers to engage with our community. We're really proud of the community that we've built. We are providing working opportunities to people with disabilities who want to enter the tech sector. Majority of our community members haven't worked in the tech sector before. So we are the first job for them. And we're hoping that through this engagement, that they get more work

experience and are able to tap into opportunities that weren't available to them before. It's completely we went through our entire organization. That's great. I love the opportunity that you're providing to people as well. Something that's coming to mind as you're speaking is what I'm assuming, and tell me if I'm wrong, the wide, wide range of features that you need to implement in order to address all types of people with disabilities, because we're speaking about people who may have sight or hearing impairment all the way to someone who may be older and just isn't, they are not as fluent in using technology. So when you're working with your clients, how do you prioritize what features you're really going to focus on and what areas you're going to focus on in order to increase accessibility overall? So we don't recommend our customers, you know, specific

features that they should work on. Our goal is to, you know, help companies and product teams be confident enough to independently make that decision. Our goal is more providing the insights from the disability community that can then influence the decisions that are being made. And the way we do that is if organizations have never interacted and gotten insights from the disability community, we definitely have recommendations of what kind of assistive technologies that you can get started with. And you can test your most top traffic pages, top traffic flows, and then continue to broaden that to make sure you're including as many assistive technologies as possible. But the goal for us is to provide

those insights and it's for our customers to be able to take those insights and act on it in the most appropriate way. No external body is going to understand the complexity of your internal systems and your internal practice, but our goal is to make sure that we're highlighting it in a way that it's easier to action on it. Thank you for sharing that. So looking ahead, what trends do you see in the realm of digital accessibility? Obviously, technology is moving faster than ever before. And I'm curious to know what you're seeing in terms of what's coming in the future. What can we expect to come down the pike

and help us to achieve better digital accessibility? There's so much happening, especially in the last year and a half, we're seeing with the predictions that we have around AI and the wide presence that it's gaining. I think for us, it's really important to make sure that it actually benefits the disability community. There is opportunity for it to create a further divide. And this is where making sure that the insights and inclusive

datasets are part of training these models. But I do think it's riding another wave that actually ties well towards digital accessibility, which is just personalization. There is a heavy focus of personalization across the board, whether it's B2C or B2B. We want to make sure that, you know, we're serving the end user well. And part of personalization is achieved by providing all the options to be able to adapt that experience to your liking. So I think there is that opportunity for companies to see how accessibility actually helps with personalization and innovation. And we've seen it in the past. There's been so many innovations that has come through and exist because of

accessibility that a lot of people might not be aware of. The fact that we have the electric toothbrush is like one physical experience to captions. Netflix mentioned that 95% of Netflix users use captions. Captions were originally designed for people with hearing impairments, and now a much broader group uses it. Voice-to-text is also something that was designed for people with disabilities, and now everyone uses it. People just talk. I don't know how many people type anymore as well. And so I think it's important to invest in that innovation of hyper-personalization and leverage accessibility for it, because we might

not know all the things it's going to unlock, but we've at least proven that every time we've done it, it's benefited a much broader audience than it had initially served. You're highlighting such a good point that going down the route of improving accessibility is actually also a source of a lot of inspiration for features that can benefit a wider range of users than expected. Like you just mentioned, you know, subtitles. I love using subtitles, especially if I'm watching like a foreign film. I prefer subtitles, even though I know this was not built for me. It's just more enjoyable, or I feel like I take in information better. And maybe that's just how my brain works. And I think there's so much that we don't necessarily acknowledge around, like when we say disability, just as we're speaking, I'm thinking about like how there's different learners and it's not necessarily what would be categorized as a disability, but it's just not,

people aren't intaking information in the most basic way or the status quo way. There's other ways that people learn and intake information and using the technology and the services that you're offering are actually enabling teams to explore different ways of people in taking information and using technology that doesn't even necessarily only touch the disability group. Would you say that's correct? I think you're hitting the nail on the head there. And this one way that I think has really helped a lot of people start thinking about accessibility from a broader lens and, you know, the Microsoft inclusive design kit has mentioned this, which is disability can be permanent,

temporary, or situational. So if, you know about someone with one arm is a permanent disability to someone who might've had a cycling incident and might've fractured their arm temporarily, it is going to be recovered. And then you have situational, which I find the most interesting because I think that's where all of us fall into, but we don't think about it that way, which is the case of a mom holding a baby and only being able to use one hand because she's holding her baby in her other hand. And like, so how would you design a touch experience on your phone so that you can operate it with one hand, but you're actually benefiting all these three scenarios, but you're designing for the

hardest and the most unique and the edge case. And I think when companies start to see the benefit of outlier and edge case testing, there is that broader benefit. And we've all been there. We've all been in situations where we feel like we're a mismatch to the environment because at that moment, it doesn't feel like a perfect fit. Everyone's going to experience disability at some point of time. But the goal is that we create experiences that include everyone. Yeah, you're really making me think about all the different ways that we can in product development? And I ask this question for those listening who are designers or who are leading product teams. I want them to be aware of what are some of those things, those traps that we might fall into when it comes to building

technology and the accessibility component of that. That's a really good question. I think there's a lot of design trends that we tend to hop on because we think it's creating a real minimal, simple experience, but we might be taking away a direction that'll help a lot more people. The most simple ones are times when you've opened an application and they've only been icons. And you might have looked at an icon that you don't recognize and you're like, oh wait, what does this mean? And it's very simple for you to just tap into it to figure it out. But now think about it from a person who's using a screen reader, who doesn't have those cues and now is listening to unlabeled icon, unlabeled icon, unlabeled icon, because we just remove the text from it.

That's a very simple example, but it just makes you think about all your digital experiences and the way we design technology. What are the cues we're removing that actually benefit a lot more people? I think the common misconception is an accessible experience is not a beautiful experience. It doesn't make your UI will not look as beautiful. And I strongly disagree. I think there are companies that have done an exceptional job in balancing this out. And at the end of the day, you want someone using your product. You don't want someone who is trying to sign up and face four different issues. Like if

you try to sign up for a brand right now and you went through like three issues, do you persist or do you just drop off? It's making sure that you're just creating an experience that everyone can use. Yeah. Who are some of those companies that are doing it really well that we can look to for inspiration? Or they're investing in this. And I think that's the first step is recognizing that there's a problem and that you are committed to solving it. Microsoft's definitely one of our partners. They have done exceptional when it comes to accessibility and it's been top down in terms of their investment for it from creating an adaptive controller to making sure most of Microsoft tools are accessible, which means that most companies can now hire people with disabilities and have a part of

their team. That is the broader benefit. I think Apple does an exceptional job when it comes to communicating the accessibility features that they've built in their products. I don't know if you've watched the greatest video and the personalized voice video that Apple released really recently. Just the power of, you know, being able to choose your voice for someone who doesn't have a voice. You don't realize how powerful that is, but it is. And so I think there are a bunch of brands that are doing an exceptional job and we're seeing more and more companies wanting to invest here and try to make sure that they're able to cater to a wider base.

Well, Alouart, thank you so much for enlightening us in the world of accessibility and technology. The future sounds very, very bright for how we can build tech that is really going to be usable by all. I have two last questions for you that we ask all of our guests on the show, as this is a customer experience focused podcast. We always like to ask, what is a recent experience that you've had with a brand that left you really impressed? It's a couple of brands. And this is for me personally, because as we're talking about, you know, wanting to

feel represented and included, as you can see, I live with Vitiligo. So anytime I see brands that advertise with models that have Vitiligo, I immediately feel included. I think it was Uniqlo that had an ad with someone with Vitiligo. Barbie came out with Vitiligo Barbie. Even recently, there was an AI-generated image of me, and I was wired to see, would it include my Vitiligo, or would it remove it? And it was really nice to see that it did include it. So I've always touched when brands show the diversity that I represent. And then one last question for you. What is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear?

I think it's one that's said a lot, but I think it really ties well to our discussion today, which is, you know, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And the reason I say that is building inclusive teams are hard, but when you do build inclusive teams, you broaden yourself to perspectives you've never had before. You build trust and then you give space for innovation. And I think at the start of this podcast, we talked about, you know, why is this a problem?

And I talked about it's because the people who build the products don't represent the people who are using the products. And I think if we start to build more inclusive cultures internally at organizations, the output of that would result in inclusive experiences for everyone. And so just something for customer experience leaders who are at the forefront of and knowing how their customers think about their products and use their products. It's something that I hear so much on this show that the customer experience really starts from the inside out. We need to be living and breathing the experience that we want to create on the outside. We need to be creating the culture and living by the values that we are exuding to our customers doing so from the inside.

So I really appreciate you sharing that. And culture eats strategy for breakfast is a great way of putting it. So thank you so much, Alwar, for coming on the show. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Where can our listeners go to find more information about you and Fable? Well, feel free to go to www.makeitfable.com

or our LinkedIn, which is just Fable? Well, feel free to go to www.makeitfable.com or our LinkedIn, which is just Fable, and you will find a ton of content and resources, and that's the best way to reach us. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, and I hope you have a beautiful day. Thank you, Lauren. Thanks for having me. You are a business leader with vision. You've seen the future as an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce's agent force, and it is bright. Getting there?

Eh, it's a little fuzzier. Don't worry. Salesforce CTOs are here to work with you side by side and turn your agent force vision into a reality. We're talking expert guidance and implementation support from the best of the best. To learn more about Salesforce CTOs, visit sfdc.co slash professional services.