(upbeat music)
Paul Bohman: Deque Axe Assistant, your AI accessibility ally.
Here at Deque, we've been working hard
at bringing the best of AI, artificial intelligence,
to the task of making the web more accessible
to people with disabilities.
Our latest addition to our AI collection of tools
is Axe Assistant,
a large language model, generative chat component
that has been expertly trained
on the vast collections of courses and training materials
in Deque University.
And that's what makes it special.
If you search the web or if you use generic AI programs
to give you answers about accessibility,
you'll get a mix of good and bad answers
because there's a lot of good
and bad information out there on the web.
Even if it's a bad answer,
an generic AI will proclaim it confidently
as if it's correct even when it's not.
And that's the thing,
you need to be able to trust the answers you get from AI.
And with Axe Assistant, the content has already been vetted
by Deque accessibility experts
so the answers are of much higher quality
when compared to generic AI.
Let's go through a few examples of what you can expect
from Axe Assistant.
I've got a few prompts that I've typed up ahead of time
just to make the demo faster,
but the answers here are real
and they're not pre-planned,
because it's generative AI and we can't predict exactly
how it will answer the question.
We just know that it will pull the answers
from Deque University.
My first example says, "How do you make videos accessible
to people who are deaf and blind?"
Axe Assistant starts generating the response
and then it starts off by saying,
"To make videos accessible to people
who are both deaf and blind,
the provision of text transcripts is essential."
And I'm not gonna read the whole thing,
but there are a couple of paragraphs of explanation
and then it creates some bullet points under the heading
Key Components for Creating Accessible Transcripts.
And the headings are Complete Content Representation,
Speaker Identification, Descriptions of Visual Elements,
Accessible Transcript Format, and Easy to Locate.
And then there's a concluding paragraph
with some links at the bottom to pages in Deque University
where it got the content.
In the next example, I give it a small snippet of HTML
and I ask it, "Is this good alt text?"
And the alt text says, "Spacer."
Axe Assistant responds, "No, that is not good alt text.
The alt attribute for an image that is used purely
for spacing or layout purposes,
commonly referred to as a spacer image,
should be set to an empty or null text alternative alt=""
to ensure it is ignored by assistive technologies."
And it says a bit more
and then provides links for further reading.
In the next example, I say, "Show me the HTML markup
for an accessible radio button group."
It tells me that, "An accessible radio button group
is typically created using native HTML elements
like fieldset, legend, and input type=radio."
And it explains a bit more than shows a code block
of HTML markup with all of those things,
including label tags.
It even gives a bit of information
about using ARIA attributes for custom radio buttons.
And if we needed,
we could ask follow up questions about custom buttons,
but I'm gonna take the ARIA idea
in a little bit of a different direction
and ask it a very specific technical question.
"If a form field has a label tag, and an aria-label,
and aria-labeledby, and a title tag.
and adjacent text not associated with the form field,
what will the screen reader say
when it lands on the form field?"
Axe Assistant repeats back some of my question,
and then it tells me that there's a hierarchy
for creating the accessible name
and it correctly identifies aria-labeledby
at the top of the hierarchy.
Let's do a couple more examples before we finish.
"How do you explain the importance of accessibility
to someone who is skeptical?"
That's my question.
This is a non-technical question
that requires some empathy and strategic thinking.
Here, Axe Assistant tells me I need a collection
of compelling and multifaceted arguments,
and then says, "Let me weave together the provided context,"
and that's referring to Deque University as the context,
"to delineate the pivotal arguments
for why accessibility matters."
And I'm not gonna read the whole thing here either,
but the headings include Ethical and Social Responsibility,
Inclusivity Boosts Business,
Integral to the Development Process,
Avoiding Negative Repercussions,
Usability is Crucial to Accessibility,
and Learning from the Source: Real User Feedback.
And here's the last example.
"How much extra work is it to make something accessible
versus just developing an inaccessible version?"
Axe Assistant concedes that developing accessible content
does involve additional effort,
but how much extra work it requires varies greatly
based on several factors.
It goes on to say that it depends.
And then the headings for the explanation
include Informed Planning Reduces Extra Effort,
Retrofitting versus Inclusive Design,
Experienced Teams with Efficient Processes,
Long-Term Cost Efficiency, and The Bigger Picture.
All of these are high-quality responses.
In all cases, you can ask follow up questions to dig deeper.
You can ask it to explain things to beginners or to experts.
You can tell it to use language
that's fit for a university level
or for elementary school level.
And there are lots of other possibilities.
So what will you ask Axe Assistant?
(gentle upbeat music)