Beyond Compliance: Fable’s Mission to Improve Digital Accessibility

**Alwar Pillai** (0:00)
Each of us today use technology that have been designed for assistive technology users first, from as simple as an electric toothbrush, which is designed for people with motor impairments, but this is something that everyone uses now. You have a voice to text, it was for people with disabilities again, and now we have Siri and Alexa, and like dictation, and all of that existed because it was designed for people with disabilities first.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:25)
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**Dan Lines** (0:46)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by the team at Fable. We have co-founder and CEO, Alwar Pillai, and engineering manager, Perry Trinier.
Alwar, Perry, thanks for joining us today.

**Alwar Pillai** (1:03)
Thanks for having us.

**Dan Lines** (1:06)
Yeah, yeah. Awesome to have you here. Now, Alwar, let's start with you in the story of Fable. You founded Fable in 2018 in Toronto.
You had the goal of making it easy for people living with disabilities to engage in the digital development process. Can you tell us about the path that led you to found Fable and what led you to identify the need for Fable?

**Alwar Pillai** (1:32)
Yeah, for sure. I was born and brought up in India. I moved to Toronto, Canada in 2015, but I've done my bachelor's in user experience design. I got to work in the industry for some time, but I was still itching to learn more. So I moved to Toronto to do my master's in inclusive design.
And when I joined this program, it pretty much shifted my entire thinking about how I approach design and how we build products. And I recognized just the biases that I had introduced in products that I designed and people that I had left behind.
My master's thesis focused around how do you design technology for seniors as they age and they start to experience memory loss? And can technology play a role in them being more socially connected?
And that's what introduced me to the world of digital accessibility. And I noticed like the digital divide and the difference in experience between someone who's able-bodied and their experience online versus someone who lives with a disability and their experience online. And it was pretty significant.
And while I was doing my master's and paying for it, which is extremely expensive, I was also finding that by working simultaneously. So I had a full-time job where I worked with one of Canada's biggest telcos as their accessibility manager. And I understood the problem from the business perspective of what is challenging for product teams to build an accessible product? What are the tools they're relying on? What are the processes they're following? And what stood out to me was everyone was just making assumptions about accessibility. No one really understood the needs of people with disabilities. No one interacted with a person with a disability. And that's why the products we use today represent the people who build them more than the people who use them. And so decided to quit my job and start Fable with my co-founder, Abid Rehani, with the goal of, you know, what happens if we connect product teams to people with disabilities throughout the product development process? And will that have an impact in the end result of the products that they put out there? That's primarily the reason why we started Fable.

**Dan Lines** (3:47)
That's awesome. So you actually, there was actually a program that you studied in school for this?

**Alwar Pillai** (3:54)
Yeah, it's called the Masters of Inclusive Design. And inclusive design is pretty much, you can apply it anywhere. The purpose of inclusive design is that the person who experiences the problem should be part of the solution.

**Dan Lines** (4:07)
Absolutely, totally makes sense. Now Perry, jumping over to you, what brought you over to Fable? How did you get involved?

**Perry Trinier** (4:14)
Sure, well, I'm a self-taught web developer. And so my path into web development was never like, what you see is what you get kind of editor web developer. I started using Notepad and eventually moved to better text editors. But I was really into web standards and progressive enhancement, graceful degradation. And so I learned from bloggers like Jonathan Snook, Derek Bellerstone and Rachel Andrew. And through that exposure to web standards, I learned a little bit about accessibility and some high-level concepts like making sure that all the functionality would be available from the keyboard. And then later on in my career, I was working at an agency from 2010 to 2016