When I first encountered Salesforce at Ovum in 2005, I found it impossible to benefit from the power of the system due to my being blind. Almost 20 years on Salesforce has built Accessibility and Inclusive Design into its processes, products and services and established an accessibility group at the heart of the business. It is a ‘multi-pronged approach’ benefiting from executive buy-in but also building up from the bottom with a specialist accessibility team spreading the word throughout the organisation.
We were delighted to be joined on Inclusively by:
● Jacqueline (Jacqui) Tolisano, Senior Director, Product Accessibility, Salesforce
● Adam Rodenbeck, Senior Digital Accessibility Engineer, Salesforce
to explore how this now works within the Salesforce model and how their lessons learned can be applied to the telecoms industry. You can listen to the podcast here.
Salesforce wants to bake its corporate values into everything they do. This includes equality and equity. Making sure that the right voices have a role in ensuring what the company does on all levels. This results in an Accessibility and Inclusive Design team, bringing users into the process to make sure that their lived experience is included in overall product development.
This results in real world feedback from people with diverse perspectives to ensure the UI is as accessible as possible for the widest possible employee and customer base.
The accessibility team has occupied various locations within the organisation as it has evolved. The group’s role was cemented into the Inclusion aspects when Paula Goldman, EVP, Chief Ethical & Humane Use Officer took over the group. It was formerly under the user experience banner but now sits firmly in the inclusion side of product development and delivery. The emphasis is now on how things are built and how the tools are in place to make things accessible and inclusive. This puts the accessibility team in close contact with the people building everything rather than being part of a refinement programme afterwards.
Salesforce senior management, all the way up to the CEO Marc Benioff, support the accessibility and inclusion subject. “It really helps having that top-down support” says Jacqueline. This is in contrast with the struggles of driving accessibility from a bottom-up approach which has been the experience in the accessibility focused world until now. There is a whole set up around senior management with a steering committee supporting the development of product to be available to as wide an audience as possible. This includes Paula Goldman, Chief Ethical & Humane Use Officer.
The Accessibility and Inclusive Design team’s role is to work with all parts of Salesforce, advise on building accessibility into products from scratch and to help smooth out any problems relating to the wider use of the products. The team has a multi-pronged approach to both assist with identified accessibility issues from the different product groups within Salesforce as well as driving activities reinforcing accessibility and inclusion throughout the organisation.
Part of the role of the group is to educate all developers around accessibility and Inclusion. The team can’t do all of the work but needs people in the different product groups to understand and include accessibility in their work. In this way teams throughout the organisation upskill and embed accessibility into everything they do, reducing the need for intervention or partnering with the accessibility team.
Adam has been working with the Salesforce Base Components Team to make sure that accessibility is built into these building blocks which different product groups then use to build their offerings. In this way accessibility issues are dealt with before the products get built and painful add-on accessibility requirements would need to be built. Hence, as these blocks get stitched together verifying that the overall experience is accessible becomes a simpler task. Testing is then whether keystrokes make sense, whether components come in readily accessible and that other accessibility features are supported.
Salesforce has multiple assistive technology users on the team. Whilst this can’t possibly cover all permutations of the different impairments, it is lived experience and helps smooth out the glitches when encountered. This includes people with cognitive issues, physical disabilities as well as vision and hearing impairments. Where there are gaps, Salesforce encourages external research to ensure it is getting the right feedback. The global recruitment process also assists by recruiting people with diverse requirements.
Despite Adam being a screen reader user, he really appreciates the diverse user research that Salesforce does. Working so close to the product can colour thoughts about its accessibility. So, feedback from a wide variety of users with different impairments and requirements really helps. Observing people using the product with a screen reader, magnifier or voice control give excellent feedback into product usage which is difficult to emulate within the organisation and having such intimate knowledge of the product and how it was built.
There are internal research groups working with the accessibility team but Salesforce also works with external vendors who provide groups with different accessibility requirements. Blind IT and Fable in Canada provide the research targets with the lived experience.
Given Salesforce’s continued acquisition trail, it is also important to note that once an acquisition is in place that the accessibility team goes to work to build Salesforce levels of accessibility into the acquired organisation. Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft all come with varying levels of accessibility and the team is open to learning how they have addressed the issues as well as sharing best practice from an Salesforce perspective.
Salesforce commits to having three major releases a year for products. This means that the accessibility and inclusion aspects are dealt with on an on-going basis. There is no big bang approach but gradually embedding accessibility into the products. Ensuring that the building blocks are accessible, that the user experience in something like Service Cloud, is accessible all come together to help each of the releases. This includes the service experience teams feeding things back to the base components groups when they are found to be not accessible. And, of course, as building blocks are brought together into a new user experience, unexpected consequences do crop up and create accessibility issues. This is why it is seen as being so important that all teams become more educated around accessibility and inclusion topics so these problems are identified and dealt with as they crop up and not handed back simply to the accessibility team.
Having senior-level input into the user experience is invaluable when it comes to design. As accessibility and inclusion become baked into all product design, the interface has certainly been modified given accessibility considerations. Salesforce is a complex set of products and the user interface is a complex layered set of products. Kat Holmes, EVP, Chief Design Officer, is a strong advocate for accessibility and ensures our products are designed with accessibility in mind. In short, having all of these inputs makes the Salesforce products universally easier to use.
Shift Left is important to Salesforce so the accessibility issues are baked into the design cycle and don’t get left out. This balances the need to fix things in existing interfaces but also builds accessibility into new products and interfaces, reducing the need to fix further down the line.
Considering issues like how keyboard interaction works, which hot keys are in action and how to access them, are really important results of designing accessibility in from scratch.
Salesforce is always looking at what assistive technologies might be used to accomplish a task. Ensuring that the right APIs are used to allow the assistive technology to work will always be sought out. The check is always to ask if it is being done in a very standard way, hence allowing the assistive technology features to build off the base components and deliver an accessible experience.
An example of refinement comes with inline error reporting. This has been an iterative process to work out how best to feed an error back to a screen reader or voice input user. It can take several rounds of the loop to get it right after feedback from users, product owners, base component providers. Feedback also comes back from the customers once the product is released. Accessibility Support fields these calls and involves the accessibility team as needed. It wasn’t necessarily announced but has now been more formalized to all feedback around inclusion is collated in the team. Adam is aware of different industry feedback, especially in the more regulated industries such as Banking and Healthcare but is not aware of telecoms specific issues.
As a blind person, Adam does struggle with colour contrast or flow discussions. But, having a team very aware of his situation always helps as simple ping can bring in help. What is more difficult is early days of product development when the product only exists in a wireframe or Figma file. These are very inaccessible. However, getting the designers to talk through the design and explain the different elements helps both Adam and the designers themselves clarify what is involved.
Adam then does a lot of visualization of what the product is, what is included and the dynamics of all included components. It helps him better understand the interface and the way the product behaves. And, also helps put what the accessibility user is experiencing into context. All too often a user of assistive technology isn’t getting the full picture of what is happening with the product/interface.
GenAI can play a major role in improving both the design and the role that someone like Adam can play in the design process. The ability of a service like Be My Eyes/AI to describe what is on the screen is a powerful tool. Yes, of course, a fellow human can do that but the GenAI is, perhaps ironically, less emotionally attached to a design and will probably read out more details in an impartial manner.
From Jacqui’s perspective, identifying as being neurodiverse, it is important to think about how the interface is presented to the user. As previously mentioned, the Salesforce product is a complex layered set of products and interfaces. Reducing this down to as simple an interface as possible, reducing clutter and focusing on the key information helps a lot in this respect.
The over-engineering should be done behind the scenes and a simple interface presented to the user – simple, elegant and intuitive to the user is the mantra.
One area of concern is how quickly we delve into GenAI. We need to be careful not to let the LLMs build existing bias into the systems and processes for future usage. The issue is ensuring that we do things responsibly. On the one hand, GenAI gives us the ability to offer cleaner switching between channels of communication depending on peoples’ needs or preferences. On the other, existing bias could pose additional problems over and above those faced by people being excluded from services today.
People should be wary of thinking that because a computer is driving this GenAI that it is fundamentally neutral. Coding, data sets, all can potentially fall foul of existing bias in the system. Paula Goldman is leading the charge inside Salesforce to mitigate bias within the coding side of the business or the experience offered to staff or customers alike.
There is a huge responsibility to make sure that GenAI is equally helpful to everyone.
GenAI tools will certainly help in the testing of how inclusively designed a product or service is. But, Jacqui sees herself as being somewhat more conservative and blending the benefits of GenAI with the more human-centric tools and specialist people involved in the testing as we have today. Some level of automation will doubtlessly help. Even if it is 30% of programmatically determinable accessibility issues could be lifted from 30% to 50% but not wiped out completely. The human factor is still required.
Adam thinks that having a human at the helm is always going to be preferable. Additionally, being able to test products with people familiar with assistive technology and the way different groups interface with the products and use them depending on impairment is vital. Jacqui would call out getting senior leadership sponsorship as the most important lesson learned from Salesforce’s experience of developing its accessibility approach.
Plus, building the understanding that accessibility should be prioritized as it is an iterative process that needs to be built into the culture as well as the business and its systems and processes. This will ensure that the accessibility issue scales and has an impact across all aspects of the organisation, employees as well as customers.
The larger and more complicated your organisation is, the more multi-pronged an approach will be required.
It is ultimately part of the overall sustainability story for an organisation. It should be built into every aspect of the business and definitely not a separate piece of thinking and execution.
In this way, the impact of designing inclusively will show up on the radar rather than being lost as has been the case in the past.
Adam also thinks that being involved with the user experience side of the business is critical. Inclusive design will not only help all excluded groups in the future, but will also benefit everyone from simpler, cleaner design.
The different personas using your service/product will require the adaptation to previously inaccessible offerings. This is not merely an engineering issue but one of design, interface and understanding how the different persona involved will be using and interacting with the product. Adam has seen major improvements in the way telcos deliver information such as billing to its customers. GenAI can only help improve that further. The barrier to this is often the legacy systems behind such activities. More modern, better designed web sites and apps can only help improve things.