Salesforce Executive Bonnie Parisi Talks New accessibility agent, AI, more in interview
In marking Global Accessibility Awareness Day, San Francisco-based Salesforce published a blog post in which the company detailed how it was “scaling accessibility in the age of AI.” In it, Salesforce announced the advent of its “accessibility agent,” a tool it said is “an AI-powered companion that helps builders translate product requirements into accessible code, review code against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines global standards, and remediate issues directly within their workflow.”
Bonnie Parisi, Salesforce’s vice president of product accessibility who authored the post, characterized the accessibility agent in the announcement as “having a dedicated accessibility expert influencing and reviewing your entire software development lifecycle in real time, right where you work.” In broad terms, Salesforce’s accessibility agent is more or less an analogue to similar tools such as Apple’s Accessibility Checker in Xcode, introduced at WWDC 2019, that exists to assist developers with “[investigating] potential accessibility issues in your app,” Apple says, and covers Apple-specific platform frameworks such as UIKit, SwiftUI, and more.
I sat down earlier this week via videoconference with Parisi, who works out of Salesforce’s Office of Ethical and Humane Use, to discuss the company’s recent announcement, as well as its ethos on disability inclusion. She explained that, at 30,000 feet, her team’s remit is to “make sure that we uphold our value of trust by making sure that all of the products that Salesforce sells and is available to customers is accessible out of the box, so able to be used by by everyone, regardless of ability.” Salesforce, she conceded, is not a company renowned for accessibility in the same way its more consumer-oriented peers like Apple or Google are viewed; but it’s a perception Parisi and team would love to see shift over time. She called accessibility “pervasive to the core” of Salesforce, adding “when I look at our core values of trust and innovation and customer success, equality… all of those things resonate around accessibility, so our approach to accessibility at Salesforce is truly pervasive.”
“We have a focus on how we ensure all of our employees have accessible experiences as they work within Salesforce, through to our real estate, and the events that we host. Then on my team is also focused on how we bring products to market—again my mission is to make sure that everybody can trust that when they buy Salesforce products that they can use them,” Parisi said of Salesforce’s ethos. “For us, it’s not an afterthought. It’s really about making sure we are accessible by design [and] we’re thinking of how we build the best products for all of our users at the start. When we’re even in that conceptualization phase by doing inclusive research [and] by building a design system that’s inclusive of accessibility so that people can build on our platform and inherit that accessibility. We then continue our standard practices through testing and validation to ensure what we ship has the highest standard of accessibility.”
As to the news of the day, Parisi told me she’s “excited” by the promise of the newfound accessibility agent, in part because she staunchly believes accessibility has real momentum in the tech industry right now. “Everything is changing rapidly” thanks to AI, she went on to tell me, and Salesforce is hellbent on making sure they can scale their years-long efforts in the accessibility arena so as to “keep up with the moment that’s happening around how we build and the speed of products being built.”
How does the accessibility agent play into this?
“[It’s] going to help meet this new demand and continue to ensure we can uphold our mission of always shipping accessible products,” Parisi said.
Parisi expounded on the “moment” happening right now with accessibility, telling me “automation historically could only take us so far, and there was a lot of expectation for manual intervention… with a lot of the emerging technologies, we felt like we could go beyond what has traditionally been capable.” She added this was something Salesforce “really wanted to pursue” and something it “wanted to capitalize on.” The agent’s scope, Parisi emphasized, was designed to be used internally by Salesforce employees, but is available to the company’s community of developers who want to take advantage of its capabilities. The endgame here, she said is to “make sure [developers] have a way to build on the platform and ensure accessibility is also built into their customizations.”
At a high level, Parisi described the accessibility agent as a chatbot to which a person can instruct it to, for instance, “please review my web component for accessibility.” The AI will then provide feedback and give recommendations for how to fix the code, at which point the user can take over and actually incorporate the advice they solicited.
When asked why working on accessibility matters to her as an individual, Parisi said her background lies in product and product managing, which she takes to heart to mean “you’re creating a solution that somebody chooses to use because it makes their lives better, makes their job better.” Such a mindset involves accessibility, or it should anyway. Parisi said, to her, “that’s rooted in making sure that I can build products that solve problems for all users… this has sort of always been part and parcel to my focus on what is good product development look like.” She also highlighted the practical need, as well as the pro-business case, for prioritizing accessibility.
“We [at Salesforce] know the spending power of people with disabilities and their families is in the trillions,” Parisi said. “Excluding such a large amount of the population does not serve us, nor does it uphold our values. So, to me, it’s the right thing to do, but it is also a great opportunity to drive our business forward.”
Indeed, pertaining to the business, Parisi said accessibility, as a corporate value to Salesforce, isn’t a skunkworks operation. Its resonance goes all the way up the ladder to chief executive officer Marc Benioff and the other C-level executives. Everyone in the company, from top to bottom, she told me, is highly invested in building and shipping robust, inclusive software for the people who work in enterprise environments. “We take this commitment we make very seriously,” Parisi said. “We don’t just talk the talk, but we walk the walk as it pertains to this. Given the investment that we’re making in driving accessibility innovation, this remains a company priority.”
Feedback on the accessibility agent has been positive thus far, Parisi said. The company is keeping track of everything and noting where improvements can be made, with her saying “we’re looking at how people are responding to the recommendations of the agent, and trying to keep the human in the loop, but make it as seamless as possible to understand the recommendations and how to apply them.” She went on to tell me she’s most looking forward to “expanding the capabilities” of the agent in the future in such a way that "upholds that value.” What that means is “we’re really scrutinizing every criteria or [wanting] the agent to be able to solve in a way that has quality and accuracy, and can be trusted, so we can continue this pattern of trusting the agent output, then being able to get the benefits of what’s intended that actually help drive the accessibility of our product as we incorporate them.”
Looking towards the future, Parisi told me she’s heartened by the immense potential of artificial intelligence to do even more genuine good for people. She believes the technology is “opening the door to a lot of opportunities to advance AI in new ways, not only to find and fix issues before they actually exist in production, but to create new experiences for all humans to work differently [and] work the way that they want.”
“I think that will be a true, tremendous unlock for all people,” Parisi said of AI’s future potential. “Beyond that, I think some of the innovations we’re driving are curb cuts. We know when we think and build with accessibility in mind, we ultimately build better products for everyone. That’s the focus we have: building true accessibility innovations that are ultimately going to just make better products for everyone who uses them.”
