Fable Secures $25M to Expand Accessibility Tools and Address AI Inclusivity

Fable adds cognitive and hearing impairments to its accessibility tools with $25M round | TechCrunch

Fable has gained a reputation as the go-to startup for helping companies build digital products that are more accessible to people with disabilities. After raising $25 million in new funding, the Toronto-based startup is now expanding the communities it supports and working to make AI training data more inclusive. Fable started in 2020 as a way to consult more easily with accessibility experts and people with disabilities, so anyone building a product could have the best advice on making it as accessible as possible. Since its A round two years later, it has been building out a more robust product offering, with content, testing, and tools that integrate more directly with developers' workflows. "Accessibility is no longer just the responsibility of the accessibility specialists or product managers -- it's shifting to everyone in the product development process: researchers, designers, product managers, engineers," said CEO and co-founder Alwar Pillai in an interview with TechCrunch. "It's historically been another group that's been responsible for it and doing the work. Now they're taking that shared accountability and responsibility, and Fable is a platform that's allowing them to do it by themselves." Companies building and maintaining large platforms have come to accept to the fact that you can't sprinkle accessibility on at the very end like Salt Bae. It has to be baked in from the start -- and making the product better for people with disabilities usually makes it better for everyone else, too. Fable initially supported vision and motor disabilities to get a warm start, Pillai explained: "We wanted to find a way just to get companies comfortable with engaging with this population, because it has historically been excluded, and these were communities that organizations are a bit more familiar with. over the course of time, we've observed a couple of trends within our customer base that made it like this is the right time for us to expand our community to represent people with cognitive disabilities and with hearing disabilities." One in six people has some form of disability, she noted, though not all are visible or even something a person may mention. There are lots of assumptions built into user experiences, about what a user can see, hear, do, and understand. Finding and improving them is not always easy if you don't have, say, a deaf person or someone with dyslexia on your testing team. "If you get the insights from these communities, you are going to, at the end, make products that work well for everyone. But it has been historically challenging for enterprises to engage with this community easily, and on demand. And that's when Fable jumps in," she said. Over the years, Fable has built out assessment tools as well as advisory ones, so product managers and engineers can track accessibility the way they do other standard function and quality milestones. A new area of tech that deserves special attention, and which Fable is hoping to improve, is the data powering AI models. Bias in data translates to bias in models, and that's as true for people with disabilities as it is for other categories. One reason for this is that these AI models tend to aim for the most aggressively average answer or response -- dead center on the bell curve. But people with disabilities tend to fall outside that average need or experience. "We're excited and cautious about the proliferation of AI; there's a huge opportunity to make experiences better for people with disabilities," said Pillai. "But at the same time, it also has the ability to amplify the digital divide that exists. We're seeing AI getting baked into so many things, but because people with disabilities have not been taken into account there, and the data that you probably collect is smaller, so they get excluded from the large models, we think they have the ability to exclude the experiences of people with disabilities because it deviates from the 'normal.' " This can be mitigated with fine-tuning or prompt engineering, but only so much; a model necessarily pulls from the datasets it's trained on, so if disabilities are not adequately represented in there -- and they aren't -- the models simply are not equipped for accessibility. Fable has been working with the community, as well as researchers and governments, to create resources and best practices. "Our goal is that, in the near future, we're able to introduce these inclusive data sets and offer testing for accessibility in AI. Our customers are already coming to us for it," Pillai said. She emphasized that, as before, it's about empowerment to include these methods in a company's own development processes -- Fable doesn't do the work for them. "Our platform now has become this dashboard where you can monitor all of your digital properties and products against these accessibility metrics. We invested in integrations, because we wanted the insights and data to live in the products that product teams are using on a daily basis," Pillai said. "We've gone from just being able to get one piece of insight to really being able to observe your performance across products, and when you think about enterprises, they have, like, 500-plus digital products. The goal for them is, how do I know if I'm getting better or not? And finally, they have metrics to prove it." The $25 million B round, led by Five Elms Capital, will be put towards standing up the new teams and products around cognitive and hearing impairments, and of course AI expertise as well. Pillai said that, while the investment climate isn't as open as it was a few years ago, they were pleasantly surprised while they were raising. "It was so different from the last few times we raised," Pillai recalled. "I remember when we raised our seed and series A it was very much, you know, trying to convince investors about the opportunity around the accessibility space. But this time around, investors had a very strong understanding of the space, the growth opportunity. It was more about, you know, how much value are you adding to customers, and how are you growing? I think that stood out."

Fable Raises $25m in Series B Funding to Protect Digital Accessibility in the Age of AI

TORONTO, Oct. 16, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Fable, a leading platform for digital accessibility powered by people with disabilities, today announced it has raised $25m in Series B funding ($33.8m CAD), led by Five Elms Capital. Fable helps some of the largest brands in the world build inclusive digital products with its accessibility testing and training solutions. The funding will be used to further this focus - and to address the heightened need for accessible products in the era of AI. Empowering Global Brands to Build Inclusive Products Fable has already established itself as a trusted partner for industry leaders, including Microsoft, Meta, NBC Universal and Walmart. These collaborations have resulted in more accessible digital experiences for millions of users worldwide. "Creating inclusive products and building AI with accessibility in mind is imperative to Microsoft's mission of empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more," said Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Vice President and Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft. "Fable's collaboration has been valuable in helping us bridge the disability divide through their community of accessibility testers and training solutions." As part of its expansion, Fable will extend its tester community beyond those who use assistive technologies to help with vision or mobility limitations to include individuals with hearing and cognitive disabilities. Nearly 20% of people worldwide are affected by hearing loss, and an estimated 13% of Americans can benefit from cognitive accessibility to assist with challenges around learning, focus and attention, memory, communication, reasoning and executive function. In addition to extending its tester community, Fable is leading a new Cognitive Accessibility Working Group that will identify best practices for including people with cognitive disabilities in accessibility testing. Bridging the AI Accessibility Gap While AI is helping bridge gaps for people with disabilities, its advancement risks creating less inclusive systems. AI training datasets often exclude data representing people with disabilities, and development teams rarely include them, leading to undetected accessibility issues and bias. From analyzing interviews to routing customer inquiries, AI can discriminate against individuals who exhibit differences, impacting the 1.3 billion people with disabilities and many more who will acquire disabilities over time. Fable's platform tackles these challenges by expanding its community of testers with disabilities to provide essential feedback, developing AI accessibility best practices, creating inclusive datasets, and offering specialized training for R&D teams on accessible AI. "AI is penetrating every field. Nearly every company is using, training or creating new AI-driven tools. This may be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to establish new norms for accessibility that truly reduce the digital divide," said Alwar Pillai, CEO and co-founder of Fable. "But there is also a very clear danger if we fail to embrace inclusive design in AI - the proliferation of digital exclusion. Our customers understand that and are partnering with us more closely than ever to build accessibility and inclusion into the heart of their AI product functions." Pioneering Inclusive AI Standards and Practices Fable's commitment to accessibility includes influencing national standards for inclusive AI through its leadership in the Canadian Technical Committee on Accessible and Equitable Artificial Intelligence Systems. "Fable has a critical role to play in the AI ecosystem, from standards development to generating inclusive datasets for large language models. We bring the voices of those impacted into the conversation and into the decision-making process," said Kate Kalcevich, Head of Accessibility Innovation at Fable. Expanding Reach and Impact The investment from Five Elms will allow Fable to meet growing demand for inclusive products by scaling its operations, expanding its tester community, expanding product offerings, reducing barriers for customers and ultimately furthering its work in accessibility best practices. "Product teams have struggled to wrap their heads around how to build and maintain accessible products. Fable understood that right from the start and changed the game with product feedback from actual users with disabilities," said Austin Gideon, Principal Five Elms Capital. "They have become the go-to-solution for enterprise organizations and have widened their presence in this segment. We are thrilled to deepen our partnership with the Fable team as they make inclusive design the norm and standard for every product team." About Fable Fable is the only accessibility platform powered by people with disabilities. We help some of the largest organizations in the world build incredible and accessible digital user experiences for over 1 billion people who live with disabilities. Fable enables accessibility managers, user researchers, designers, and developers to connect remotely and on-demand to people with disabilities, who are daily assistive technology users. Fable also provides full-service training, embedded research programs and expert-led workshops that help companies operationalize accessibility and move beyond compliance. About Five Elms Capital Five Elms Capital is a leading growth investor in world-class software businesses that users love. Five Elms provides capital and resources to help companies accelerate growth and further cement their role as industry leaders. With over $3 billion in assets under management and a global team of 70+ investment professionals, Five Elms has invested in more than 70 software platforms globally. The firm's operational value creation team supports the portfolio, working alongside companies to accelerate growth, build executive teams, improve retention and sales & marketing efficiency, upgrade analytical infrastructure, and expand into new markets. Ian Lipner Firebrand Communications [email protected] Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs