Preety Kumar at Microsoft Ignite: How Accessibility is Shaping the Future of AI
Deque founder and CEO Preety Kumar took the stage at Microsoft Ignite on November 18, joining Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Microsoft’s Chief Accessibility Officer, and Ed Summers, Head of Accessibility at GitHub, for a presentation titled “Building for Everyone: How Accessibility is Shaping the Future of AI.”
Jenny got things started with a delightful welcome, immediately charming the full room with a query about whether there had been long lines at lunch. She then embarked on a brief but comprehensive overview of what digital accessibility is and why it matters.
She covered Microsoft’s commitment to what she termed “accessibility at the speed of trust,” and outlined the three components of their approach: skilling, inclusive design, and listening systems.
If you’ve enjoyed a presentation from Jenny before, you know she’s got a tremendous knack for approachably balancing the tangible and the technical, and her self-styled “British sarcasm” certainly plays a key role in that—she got quite a laugh from the crowd when she asked if anyone had heard of AI!
Before closing her segment, she made a direct and powerful plea to the audience: “If you’re not yet invested in accessibility today, I ask you to change that … we need all of you. Lives change because of this work.”
All of us at Deque know this to our core, and it’s why we were thrilled to be a part of the Ignite experience. We were especially gratified by Jenny’s introduction of Preety, where she highlighted Deque as “one of our most amazing partners that we have worked with for decades.”
Part of the magic of Ignite is the scale of the event itself; it’s massive, and the actual experience serves to reinforce the scale of ambition that is everywhere present. Preety herself wasted no time clarifying Deque’s ambitions, stating right from the start that “our mission is to help every organization become and stay accessible.”
After giving the audience an introduction to our approach—which brings together technology, education, and services—she spoke directly to the question that seemingly looms over every discussion about AI: Will it help, or will it hurt?
When it comes to digital accessibility, Preety’s answer was clear: AI will help. It gives us the power to fix thousands of issues at a time at a pace never before possible, and, even more importantly, to proactively prevent issues in the first place.
In mentioning proactive digital accessibility, Preety echoed Jenny’s earlier assertion that “we must shift left,” and noted that when issues aren’t addressed until production, costs soar.
Preety continued to build on the themes that Jenny established, offering a twist on her “at the speed of” language to introduce the concept of “accessibility at the speed of AI.”
Agentic AI is central to this new era of digital accessibility, and Preety outlined Deque’s vision for an approach that combines the speed and scale of AI with human expertise to create a system where developers are in the driver’s seat, supervising code and making expert determinations about what to approve, improve, and reject. What this approach does is to create a continuous loop—code, find, fix, validate—that happens “at the speed of AI.”
Preety has been known to rely on her fair share of driving metaphors in her presentations. At Ignite, she memorably extended her “driver’s seat” analogy to include false positives, likening them to an air bag exploding when the car hasn’t actually been in a collision!
While this was the first mention of false positives, it was not the last. During the closing portion of Ed Summers’ presentation, he referred to no false positives as a “gift” from Deque and described Axe-core as “the gold standard of website scanning.”
Ed also touched on the theme of a “continuous” AI-powered cycle, joining Jenny and Preety in highlighting the need to “shift left”:
All three presenters delivered a wealth of insight and information, with Ed’s final comments taking everyone right to the final seconds of the allotted time. While there wasn’t time for live Q&A, the recording from the presentation will be available on the Ignite website, and we look forward to continuing the conversation with our global community.
We want to thank Microsoft and the Ignite team for an incredible conference experience, and especially Jenny Lay-Flurrie and Ed Summers for being such brilliant co-presenters. We are also grateful to everyone who attended live or watched the event online.
As all conferences must, Ignite comes to an end, but the mission of digital accessibility is ongoing. And, as Jenny said, we need you all!
