Adobe Sneaks: An Accessibility Tool for Building Digital Experiences

By Steve Ham­mond, leader in Adobe’s Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing busi­ness unit

Once a year, a call goes out to over 21,000 employ­ees across Adobe’s offices around the world. Any­one in the com­pa­ny, from engi­neers and data sci­en­tists, to UX design­ers and prod­uct man­agers, have a chance to put forth inno­v­a­tive ideas that can evolve the way in which brands engage online and in the phys­i­cal world.

Lever­ag­ing the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy in areas like AI and mixed real­i­ty, sub­mis­sions are whit­tled down to a final set of 7 projects that are shared pub­licly. Over the years, Sneaks has become a core inno­va­tion engine for Adobe, deliv­er­ing capa­bil­i­ties like an AI assis­tant in ana­lyt­ics and per­son­al­ized web lay­outs, cho­sen by a machine.

Project Access Ace

The World Health Orga­ni­za­tion esti­mates that 2.2 bil­lion peo­ple around the world suf­fer from some form of visu­al impair­ment. When these indi­vid­u­als want to engage with their favourite brands online, they are unable to expe­ri­ence it in the way it was intend­ed. On web­sites, in emails and more, they can have dif­fi­cul­ty with colour con­trast or text spac­ing. And for those that are com­plete­ly blind, screen read­ers often omit or add incor­rect words.

Project Access Ace gives mar­keters an easy way to build con­tent (includ­ing emails and web pages) that is more acces­si­ble for peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties. Impor­tant­ly, it can be inte­grat­ed with any app or used as a stand­alone tool, mak­ing it as easy as pos­si­ble for orga­ni­za­tions to lever­age. In Adobe Cam­paign for instance, an app used for build­ing and man­ag­ing mar­ket­ing and email cam­paigns, a wid­get would instant­ly detect image or copy issues that are not com­pli­ant with the Web Con­tent Acces­si­bil­i­ty Guide­lines (WCAG).

Through AI, an acces­si­bil­i­ty check­er scans the asset and pro­vides a score (out of 100), which can be improved when acces­si­bil­i­ty issues are cor­rect­ed for. With the same sim­plic­i­ty of a spell check­er, these prob­lems can be fixed with a just a few clicks. If the col­or con­trast of an email ban­ner is the issue for instance, one click auto­mat­i­cal­ly changes that por­tion of the email. Or, if the screen read­er does not include the prop­er alt text, all the instances are iden­ti­fied and can be corrected.

For mar­keters and any­one who cre­ates web expe­ri­ences, this tool does not inter­rupt an exist­ing work­flow as it can inte­grate direct­ly into their exist­ing apps. It offers an incred­i­bly sim­ple way to ease the chal­lenges of the com­plex and impor­tant task of ensur­ing that dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences are acces­si­ble for all users.

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