From Insight to Action: Establishing Accessibility as a Digital Marketing Standard

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VOICEOVER: From Insight to Action, Establishing Accessibility as a Digital Marketing Standard. Ben Ogilvie, Head of Accessibility for Arctouch. Hannah Arner, Senior Manager, Digital Consumer Experience, The Coca-Cola Company. Josh Lobner, Global Head of Inclusive Design for VML. Moderator, Caroline Derosier, Founder and CEO of Scribly.

CAROLINE DESROSIERS: Thanks so much to Karae and Ross, and thanks to the Sight Tech Global team and the Vista Center for hosting this conference and really all the great work that you’re doing in this space. I’m Caroline Derosier, Founder and CEO of Scribly, and we are a company that’s focused on making digital media accessible and inclusive to everyone. And I’m super excited to be here and looking forward to digging into this topic. Today’s brands and businesses have more opportunities than ever to engage with new and innovative brands and businesses. And I’m so excited to be here and be able to speak with you today and share with you how we can get this industry moving forward. Are they reaching out to existing customers online? And of course, that also means there is a ton of competition out there, which leads us to the question of the day. Are brands truly reaching all of their digital customers? What are they doing to stand out in marketing campaigns? According to a fable study, disabled people shop online twice as often as the population as a whole, so, Matt, that means there’s this huge opportunity to reach this audience. And being as digitally driven as they are, these are loyal customers and it’s so important to make sure that these campaigns are landing. Yet so many of these campaigns are still letting accessibility fall through the cracks. And we need to fix that. We can also fix that. We know how to do that. I’m really excited about this panel that we’ve pulled together today because we all represent a different stage across the digital marketing process. So, we’re not only going to be talking about why accessibility is so important for digital marketing, we’re also going to be talking about how to make it happen. And this panel is also really cool because a lot of us actually work together. We’re going to give you an inside look into how brands and agencies design, develop and deliver accessible and inclusive campaigns at every stage of the process from start to finish. So welcome to our panelists. And I’d love to start with some introductions. Please introduce yourself, your connection to the topic of accessible campaigns and also how you all work with others on this panel. And Josh, let’s start with you.

JOSH LOEBNER: Yeah, definitely. Hi, everyone. I’m Dr. Josh Loebner, Global Head of Inclusive Design for VML, which is a WPP company. Basically, WPP is a holding company of any number of different advertising agencies and glad to have some sibling companies and brands we work with here on this call. As a quick aside, I am disabled, fully blind in my left eye, legally blind in my right. So this conversation is both personal and personal. Personally and professionally on point and excited to be a part of the conversation.

CAROLINE DESROSIERS: Great. And Hannah, let’s go to you next.

HANNAH ARNER: Sure. Yes. Hi, I am Hannah Arner, Senior Manager of Digital Consumer Experiences at the Coca-Cola Company. I am responsible for all of our own digital channels for the US and Canada. So that includes our brand websites, our native applications like Plus One, which you will probably hear come up a few other times in this panel. And CRM. So as a digital native and career-long digital marketer, accessibility has always been an incredibly important topic to not only my work, but to me as an individual. So prior to joining Coca-Cola, I’ve worked across a variety of industries and different clients. Some were incredibly committed to creating accessible mediums and others were just learning or considering accessibility for the very first time. So excited to share a little bit about that experience with you today.

CAROLINE DESROSIERS: Great. Thank you. And Ben.

BEN OGILVIE: Hey. I’m Ben Ogilvie. I’m Head of Accessibility at ArcTouch. We are also a WPP company, as Josh referenced. And we specialize in custom software design, largely for native apps, as well as web, IoT, other products. And my job is to make sure that when we’re working with clients, they are thinking about disability inclusion and accessibility from the very beginning. And all the way throughout the work stream. And think about how we can build products that reach the largest possible audience. Personally, I’m connected to accessibility. I have both a father and a son with disabilities. And so it’s, as Josh mentioned, both personal and professional passion for me. Our team helps the Coca-Cola company with originally inclusive design and now coaching on how to develop accessibility features. And Josh and I also often connect on ways that agencies can help other brands prioritize accessibility and inclusive design.

CAROLINE DESROSIERS: Fantastic. So we have Josh representing agency. We have Hannah representing brand, and Ben talking about technical solutions and accessibility services. We really have a lot of the pieces of the puzzle here in this room today. So I want to start, sort of at the beginning of the process. And I’m going to start with you, Hannah. When establishing a delivery channel to reach customers, keeping accessibility in mind from the beginning is absolutely crucial. We talk about it all the time. If you want to reach that broadest audience possible. So, I would love to hear if you have any examples of where you’ve laid that groundwork successfully at Coca-Cola. How did you go about it? How was leadership involved in actually creating that buy-in?

HANNAH ARNER: Absolutely. Yeah. That’s one of my favorite things to talk about. So, we had a very unique opportunity last year with our native app for North America. We, as Coca-Cola, have had a native app for many, many years available for our consumers. But it was very much time for a refresh. Not only for our backend tech, but also for our frontend interface. So, we spent a significant amount of time going through consumer research, testing, reevaluating the purpose. And we really wanted to make sure that our native app can serve in a consumer’s life. Coca-Cola is a brand that is crafted for every person to enjoy. And we really wanted to carry that same sentiment into our digital ecosystem. So we committed very early on to developing a native app with accessibility as a top priority. In the very early stages of our development, rather than trying to adjust or retrofit during or after the build. This was a significant learning curve for our development teams. But it was absolutely worth the effort. And we are better for it. With the support of our partners, like Ben and Arctouch, we’ve seen an overwhelmingly positive result coming out of user testing. And support from our leadership team has also been incredible. Accessibility is something that we are deeply committed to. And it was really a wonderful experience to make that commitment. At the beginning of the product lifecycle, I’d really see it from start to launch, and I won’t say start to finish because we are never finished. It is an ongoing process, but really was just an incredible experience for us over the last year.

BEN OGILVIE: Yeah. I will just say my experience with Hannah’s team and with other clients where leadership buy-in is kind of the linchpin of delivering on content, resisting accessibility and disability inclusion. When you’ve got stakeholders who are … who understand the why and aren’t looking at it just from a compliance standpoint, but from a human standpoint and addressable market standpoint, and understand how disability inclusion and accessibility also align with both human imperatives and business imperatives, it really makes all the difference because in any project, in any delivery, there’s always going to be …

CAROLINE DESROSIERS: The competing priorities, having folks with the mindset of it’s worth the effort and being able to push past the areas where there’s there’s friction makes all the difference, yeah it seems like that’s where the spark happens in a sense where um this desire to reach customers in a new way and to figure out some of the challenging aspects to uh to solving some of the problems within these workflows it starts with that buy-in um and it’s so crucial um to ensuring success along the way uh so I’d love to go to Josh now because there’s this critical relationship that happens when we’ve set up marketing channels when brands have made that intentional move forward that yes we do want to take on accessibility and disability inclusion in our branding um they often work with partners with agencies to keep delivering that content um. To find out the right messaging to really craft the the creative in the right way, um, so I’d love for you Josh to speak to what kinds of practical steps and processes need to be put in place to ensure that really every piece of this content remains consistently accessible, um, especially to people with vision impairments. At what point in that process should brands be working on alt text for images and audio description for videos? I want to get really specific about that because those are so important to the community. So kind of a lot of questions thrown into one, but feel free to start wherever, wherever you’d like.

JOSH LOEBNER: Yeah, definitely. And if I miss anything in my answer, please do refresh the question and I’ll be happy to add to it. But real quick, big announcement from Cannes Lions for 2025: The International Festival of Creativity has created a new line focused on excellence in image description for 2025. This is a first, accessibility isn’t simply commoditized or focused on policy or litigation, or something that we want to devolve to, but we have an opportunity to see inclusive design, accessibility, and particularly accessibility for people who are blind or partially sighted, for image descriptions to be awarded in the best creative. Category out there in advertising, can lines, so that’s a consideration really. Where we’re looking at process, that accessibility shouldn’t be an afterthought or bolted on, but central and embedded in at the heart of a campaign, or any creative. That uh accessibility can be a gateway to creativity. So what does that mean in the process from the creative brief from the initial strategy that we are talking internally as teams, that there are people with disabilities that are potentially part of the team, internally at the agency and brand, or that we can co-create with blind and partially-sighted communities so that they voices can be a part of a creative campaign or may wrong when they are fascinating and creative creative of that process. As we map out processes to develop omnichannel campaigns, integrated marketing campaigns, we have different touch points, whether it’s for production, photography, location scouting, developing research that aligns anything that we’re doing to create images, either that are still or in video, in a way that’s compelling and within a campaign. We want to be able to map out that creative process for the agency and for the client, but we also want to hear from customers what’s their customer journey as a blind consumer, as somebody that’s part of a marginalized group, and how they have barriers, and how we can navigate through those to ensure that as we’re creating something that it is authentic, it hits the mark, and it’s not for that community but with them. Particularly when it comes to alt tags, image descriptions, again, how can we be creative? We’re wanting to drive people forward within a customer journey, not have them stop at one place and not move, and not be able to go further down that pathway towards some type of action. And so within an image description, it’s not simply talking about a tableau of what’s in a scene, but what’s important in the scene that I can latch onto as a consumer to move forward. While we do have artificial intelligence within our teams and processes to be able to articulate what’s seen in an image, and not just one image, but digital asset managers for huge campaigns that we can create image descriptions for vast assets. There’s the AI component, but there’s also that human component that we can allow people from the community to share their thoughts on if this aligns with their thinking on what’s important in an image to be described. And we test to ensure that what’s described in an image is as important as ever. Audio descriptions are still an afterthought. They are barely incorporated into advertising. There’s a lot of complexities around that, and we’re striving to make some changes that I’m happy to talk about later. But the thing about audio descriptions or alt tags is that, whether it’s for video or photography, we cannot let it be an afterthought, but ensure that we can be regimented, cumulative, and methodical and repeated within what we’re doing to ensure that it is just as much another layer of creativity as any other component of a campaign.

CAROLINE DESROSIERS: Right. I agree. It’s all fantastic. I’m really excited by everything you just said. Accessibility and especially alt text and audio description is a creative endeavor. I’m so glad that it’s being recognized. It also is so often, and I think it’s really important that we question the part that falls through the cracks in campaigns. We see campaigns launch that actually are meant to represent disabled people with new and exciting products, and the alt text and the audio description is missing, and it’s just fallen through the cracks along the way. But bringing that further back to the folks that are in those creative teams and making decisions, and working on that is so, so important. It’s very exciting to hear about the work that you’re doing. Throwing it out to just the panel to kind of to follow up any of that. Which teams should be responsible for this work or teams? Should there be a collaboration? How can we kind of create this creative energy?

BEN OGILVIE: I mean, I’ll start with. There is. You’ll hear this probably on every panel today and in this, that everyone has their role to play. Everyone has it. It is a team effort. Right. Accessibility is a team sport. And so there is the aspect of it needs to be part of the product requirements. It needs to be part of the when we’re talking about building out, it needs to be part of the creative brief. It needs to be part of the copy team. It needs to be part of, you know, everyone has an aspect of making sure that they’re keeping inclusion in mind throughout the work stream. And I’ll touch on this a little more later. Where there can be challenges if a person or a team within that work stream doesn’t carry that forward into the next step in the workflow. But I think it is critical to also have those creative partners in place. And with the plus one app, as an example, we work with your team to assist with that descriptive and rich image description, copywriting. And as we get into video, we’ve worked with you on other projects on making sure we have that contextual rich audio description for videos. And it really does make a huge difference to have that lens, that creative lens as part of the creative process.

CAROLINE DESROSIERS: Great. Thank you so much, Ben. Thank you. Of course, there are challenges, right? It’s very difficult to implement something new within a workflow, especially one that’s been longstanding with teams that are used to working in a certain way. Coordinating these accessibility efforts across any organization is difficult. Teams have different timelines. How does this change that? There’s varying levels of experience and expertise within these teams. And they’re always juggling. They’re always juggling competing priorities and timelines. So, Ben, I’m going to start back with you. What have been the greatest obstacles to overcome for large organizations? Where have you found successes? And where do you feel there are still opportunities?

BEN OGILVIE: Yeah. As I mentioned, I think shared prioritization is really crucial and has been in some instances a challenge. Because everybody has certain accountabilities and certain things that are measured against from a business output standpoint. And if a member of that work stream doesn’t have their incentives aligned with prioritizing accessibility and disability inclusion as part of their KPIs, it is tempting when the rubber meets the road and timeline changes. It is tempting when the rubber meets the road and timelines are tight to push it out and think, oh, we’ll get to it later. We’ll come back to it. And as we all know, later never happens. Or it is dramatically more expensive to do it later. And so that’s a big one. Another challenge is just churn. You know, we can have team members either on our side or team members on stakeholder or client side who are fully bought in. But if you have a new stakeholder come in who hasn’t had that shared, you know, opportunity, it’s going to be challenging. Because it’s the collective prioritization. Things can start to fall off. And then two other quick challenges. One is the channels themselves, platforms, can actually strip accessibility artifacts from campaigns as they’re being distributed through omnichannel. You can lose audio descriptions. You can lose captions or alt text depending on what channels they are distributed through. And that’s something that you know we need to work with the platform providers themselves to make sure that their metadata passes through effectively. And the last one just for, you know, in the context of a lot of the work that my team does is the kind of wild west of how accessibility, web accessibility, web content accessibility applies to native apps, which is kind of a different animal. So as far as successes, I think the biggest value the best way to get those stakeholders aligned is through empathy and exposure. Nobody wants to do the wrong thing. Nobody wants to be exclusionary, but there’s often just a lack of awareness and seeing the human impact of something you’re creating not be able to be enjoyed by real people can really switch the thinking from compliance or timeline to how do we, how do we craft this in a way that really resonates with as many people, with everyone we want to reach. And then embedding some of that expertise in with teams, making sure you’ve got the right folks with expertise at each of those steps in the work stream to help advise and coach and upskill people who are newer to the work really makes a difference as well.

CAROLINE DESROSIERS: Yeah, it really does. It’s hard to be new at something. Yeah. It’s hard to be new at something to make mistakes. It’s part of the process. We have a lot to re-design our creative workflows and I imagine there will be mistakes, but being forgiving of that and learning from them and planning for the future with an understanding of how this impacts. I love what you said there. Hannah or Josh, I’d like to hear from you as well. You know, how does it feel to be new about this or maybe speak to some of the options that you have? You know, what are some of the obstacles of why this hasn’t happened yet? Why it has been a challenge to implement up until now?

JOSH LOEBNER: Well, just to jump in and I couldn’t agree more with everything Ben shared and just a consideration, my role, Ben’s role and others on the client side, there were not tech startups that focused on accessibility innovations 10 years ago. There were not global heads of inclusive design 10 years ago, let alone, you know, six, seven years ago. So we’re seeing shifts where there is now leadership, but it’s still relatively new. There are so many advocates and allies in the space now when it comes to accessibility and disability inclusion and supporting blind and low vision consumers and bringing more people who are blind and partially sighted to be at the table and working at agencies and brands. But a challenge is it’s still fresh, it’s still new. So that means a lot of training, a lot of team learning and trying to engage those clients that do have leadership like Coca-Cola’s. Some of them do, some of them don’t. And for those that don’t, it’s still a bit of a leap of faith because also there’s not a lot of data about disabled consumers out there. There may be broad data, but there’s not a lot of data specific to particular brands. And so it’s really this Catch-22 where we try to get certain clients who may be earlier on that path of accessibility to anchor into it and to start moving forward. But without the data, it can be a hurdle. And so there’s lots of complexities that go beyond the need to have it to really having to explain and educate in so many ways that go beyond the functional considerations of accessibility within the process, to the why it’s necessary.

HANNAH ARNER: Yeah, I would echo everything that Ben and Josh shared. I would also say we as a massive global organization, as Coca-Cola, we probably experience this more than most. Even though Plus One is a North America specific channel, we, I think it’s really important to consistently share the progress and the learnings around accessibility with other teams and regions across the globe. Of course, there are nuances when it comes to accessibility requirements and compliance and things like that, depending on your specific location or region, but the commitment to meet and exceed those requirements is a global understanding for us at Coca-Cola. I think that’s been very, very crucial to our success. Just showcasing the work, sharing it with other teams, sharing that excitement that we have is truly infectious. So as I mentioned earlier, this is a continuous process. There will always be room for improvement, but sharing the learnings that we have gained with other teams, it serves as inspiration. And it’s really that intentional effort to share the progress, that has made the biggest impact for us.

CAROLINE DESROSIERS: That really merges nicely with, oh, sorry, Ben, go ahead.

BEN OGILVIE: I wanna just say one other quick thing. One other huge success that we’re starting to see is that brands are starting to include language around disability inclusion and accessibility expectations, consistently in both contract language and creative briefs, which drives that aspect of accessibility. So when we were thinking about this as a requirement and as an expectation in both the initial building of a channel and in the delivery of ongoing campaigns, like from a client or buyer perspective to drive that, really does make the expectation resonate on a consistent basis as part of the lifeblood of those ongoing campaigns. And that is a key thing.

CAROLINE DESROSIERS: Yeah. I wanna dig into this question of consistency, because we’ve started to see more campaigns, more advertisements that feature disabled people hitting, you know, large stages and moments like the Super Bowl. And we’re also hearing there’s organization happening around this from a leadership level like we’ve talked about. So how do we keep that consistency, not just for campaigns that are about the disability community, but really across all campaigns, that this is just the standard way of doing marketing from here on out? Hannah, I’d like to start with you, but I’m sure Ben and Josh, you also have thoughts on this.

HANNAH ARNER: Yeah, absolutely. Honestly, I think it is incredibly important to find an agency partners who are as passionate about this as you are. That is really what it comes down to. So we’re so fortunate to have the experts within WPP between Josh and Ben here as two examples, consistently pushing us to be better and keep the momentum that we’ve gained so far when it comes to accessibility. So beyond our initial rebuild and the focus on assistive technology, we conduct consistent user testing with a wide range of users, including those with blindness and low vision. And I think that real-time feedback that we gather from those sessions has led to not only creating solutions that address those specific concerns, but it also serves as inspiration to how we can improve the overall experience for all consumers. So it’s really vital that we capture that feedback along the way, never assuming that we’ve ever reached a stopping point when it comes to addressing accessibility. But having those agency partners. And I think it’s really important for us as a community to be able to engage with our partners on that journey with you, one-to-one to hold you accountable, but also just to really keep pushing and keep that momentum moving-has been our biggest driving force.

JOSH LOEBNER: I’ll jump in and share. We really do see opportunities that this shouldn’t be simply for a diversity brief or a disability-specific brief that we want to engage a particular audience that we want to elevate accessibility, not relegate it to just one campaign for one point in the year. I’m looking at the other. We are like global accessibility awareness day, right? How can we regularly and repeat that continuity across campaigns? And, what that takes is leadership. It takes people who are having a drumbeat across agencies and brands. But particularly it takes metrics and insights to be able to do research, to invite people with disabilities to share insights. We do need co-creation and user testing to continually optimize the work, but we also need at the other end when it comes to conversions and return on investment. Turn on investment to be able to measure consumers’ brand awareness, brand impact, dollars spent, finances converted to purchasing product to know that what we’re doing with accessibility is meaningful and making a difference to the bottom line. That it’s not just a nice to have for a brand or in line with particular policies or governance, but actually consumers are hopefully purchasing more products because of the accessibility and it’s not just people with disabilities that are purchasing those products because of accessibility, but accessibility can benefit so many more people than just people in the disability community or particularly in this case, those who are blind or visually impaired.

CAROLINE DESROSIERS: Yeah, it seems like we we have an opportunity here for some healthy competition with creative agencies figuring out how they can provide this. Service to brands to their clients who need this, they’re asking for it, they’re trying to figure out how to implement it within their campaigns. And they need great partners, as Hannah had said. So that seems like we should start seeing more of that from agencies, you know, rolling up the sleeves and figuring out how we can get this done. And also from Ben, organizations like ArcTouch that are helping and down in the weeds of how do we create this platform and make it accessible from the beginning. We have the services that we can offer you to help actually get this done and see it all the way through. So do you have anything to add, Ben, on that point?

BEN OGILVIE: Yeah, I think I have this, the corner of the universe where I sit, as part of a large holding company like WPP. And I see the number of things that agencies touch on behalf of brands in every sector around the world. And many agencies, historically, have not have seen accessibility as a compliance checkbox at best. And only if it’s in the contract language, if a client asks for it. And I, you know, I say, I talk often about just selfishly; the world I need my son to grow up in is one where that thinking is flipped and where agencies are – that can be one of the driving forces behind building more inclusively and consistently encouraging clients to to push farther and farther above the floor of compliance. And a world where agencies are trying to outcompete each other on who can do accessibility and disability inclusion the best is the world I need my son to grow up in. And so, you know, again, that’s just kind of a selfish personal thing. But I feel that there is so much opportunity to for us to partner with our clients and brands and help to build that consistent DNA of inclusion throughout the creative process, throughout the technological process. And like I said, it takes it takes all of us playing our role. But I see so much opportunity to make a significant impact there.

CAROLINE DESROSIERS: That’s great. Thanks so much for saying that, Ben. So we’ve talked a lot about how the really good work happens in the process, right, from you know between the agency and creative and and brands working together all along the way, really excellent humans that are great at their jobs figuring out how to make this work. Of course, we’re also in the age of generative AI and we need to think about how does technology come into the mix to power these creative teams, to power the marketing process? At this point, we’re kind of all aware it exists. It’s more like how is it used? How is it useful? So starting with Josh, are there areas where generative AI is doing a really good job making consumer marketing more accessible at scale and areas where it still misses the mark? You can answer one or both of those questions and then we can we can open up for a dialogue.

JOSH LOEBNER: Yeah, definitely. Thanks for that question. It’s amazing to be both disabled and in a space that focuses on accessibility right now, particularly with AI, because there are things that are happening with artificial intelligence at the confluence of that and accessibility that were just pipe dreams, let alone a year ago, if not sooner. So one of the things that we’re working on when it comes to AI and accessibility is audio descriptions. Audio descriptions right now are a bit fractured and challenging within the creative process, typically using outside vendors from agencies, costing different levels across different vendors, different timeframes. And ultimately, when we divest audio descriptions from the creative process, it starts to dumb down the creativity. And so people who are listening to audio descriptions in advertisements that may be done by an outside party may not as easily align with the creative, with the campaign, with the call to action. So at WPP, we are incorporating artificial intelligence in bold new ways and bringing accessibility into that where, for example, within our production studio, we’re creating a brand-only product that uses AI-powered video descriptions, where video can be developed at scale for campaigns very easily, and more directly, within brand creativity where we are pulling in brand guidelines, audience insights, media placement data, through artificial intelligence that aggregates all this data to more optimally and effectively and creatively deliver assets. We’re incorporating an AI-powered audio description tool. It’s still in prototype, and we’re piloting our it out where within that creative process, agency teams now can on the fly be able to create dynamic audio descriptions in ways that are more optimally aligned to a campaign and to a brand that just imbues narrative that ties into what the message needs to be, what it should be, and how it can drive consumers. It’s saving time. Hopefully, it saves money, and as well, it gets customers to take that next step. And the other opportunity is that the AI can be toggled in a way that the audio descriptions can fit within a particular advertising segment, let’s say 30 seconds or 60 seconds, but as well, it could be expanded audio description in a way that, say, on a brand’s website, it allows people who are blind or partially sighted to really unpack a lot more about the content. The richness and nuance of the tableau of what’s being conveyed through video, through audio.

BEN OGILVIE: Yeah. I think I look at the work that’s happening there in prototype. I look at just recently Seeing AI launched a new suite of features, the Microsoft Seeing AI app, if anyone’s not familiar, launched a new suite of features where a user can upload a video, and it will process and present. That audio description of the video, so that can benefit end users, not just through a campaign, but end users with a video that their friends sent them, and again, it’s not perfect, but it gives more access than existed previously, and it also, PDF recognition in Seeing AI is new, and so those sorts of things, I think, are really important. I think, are really important, and so those sorts of things, I think, are really important, and so those sorts of things that are on the end user side can be paired with those additional steps in the creative process to make sure that the creativity is there and the inclusion is there in the campaign, but also giving end users the ability to dive deeper if they choose to on their own, and having that combination of AI-assisted efficiency in the creative process and user-facing AI on demand. Making sure that the creativity is there and the inclusion is there in the campaign, but also giving end users the ability to dive deeper if they choose to on their own, and having that combination of AI-assisted efficiency in the creative process and user-facing AI on demand. Where they can choose to go as deep into the content as they want to, I think, is a really exciting thing. One of the things that I keep talking to clients about, though, is don’t assume that AI is going to mean you can’t think about it anymore, because you’re then turning over your brand voice in ways that could be damaging. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. to ensure that the AI is a good draft and that it is being taken across the finish line in a way that lands and resonates appropriately is so important, so, and will continue to be.

HANNAH ARNER: Yeah, Ben, I was just going to say that exact same thing. So all of the tools and all of the advancements that have come out of AI are incredibly exciting, but I think for me personally, I know I still have so much to learn when it comes to AI for accessibility, but I think that point around the human-centric nature of it is still very, very relevant and very, very important. We never want to lose that human-centric nature of the work that we do and how we approach our brands and our campaigns. Once the technology enables us to better serve our consumers, we’re really excited to lean in and test and see what we can accomplish. But yeah, making sure that a human is the one that carries it over the finish line is very, very important.

CAROLINE DESROSIERS: Great perspectives all around. And glad you are all working at these roles because it does take these perspectives at every point, thinking about how can we power our creative teams? How can we use technology in a really smart way to advance our workflows to make things better? We need both. That’s kind of where it sounds like we’re landing. So I’d love to just do a round and have you all share any parting thoughts or key takeaways that you really want to include as part of the discussion of this topic. And Ben, I’m going to start with you.

BEN OGILVIE: I’ll kind of restate a few things that we touched on earlier, but just I think bear repeating. I think thinking about maintaining and prioritizing inclusion at global scale and at the rapid pace of business, just comes back to that refrain that when you’re in this space, you’ll hear regularly. But again, it bears repeating that accessibility isn’t a project. It’s a process. It has to be part of the DNA, part of the culture. The only way it survives and thrives in a lightning-fast environment is through being embedded, having authentic representation embedded from the beginning. And throughout the work stream, making sure you have folks with the right mindset and expertise, as we mentioned, to help upskill those around them who are newer to the work and finding those opportunities to optimize and work efficiently so that it becomes part of the way of doing business, the way of creating content, creating digital platforms, and that it extends beyond digital and into the world. So I think that’s the key to the inner play between digital and physical and real products and all of those touch points in the customer journey. Finding those areas to optimize and build it into the process while also making sure that we never lose track of that human at the center of it. And so that’s why I’m so thankful to have partners like all of you to work with in this work, because it is an exciting challenge. And I think that’s the key. And it keeps getting more and more interesting.

HANNAH ARNER: Absolutely. I think a great way to summarize this conversation is three P’s for me. Process, prioritization, and partners. You have to have accessibility as a part of your process, fully ingrained just as much as any other piece of the process would be. You have to have the right partners to bring you along on that journey and hold you accountable and really move the work forward. And then that prioritization piece is incredibly important, making sure that you’re building with accessibility in mind at the beginning of the project rather than trying to accommodate at the end. I think those three points are really a great summary of everything that we’ve discussed today. So, really thankful to have our existing partners here on this call. But, yeah, I think there’s so much opportunity and we’re so excited for how much we can accomplish together and the path forward that we have.

JOSH LOEBNER: I’ll just jump in quickly and share the two C’s. It’s not only about accessibility supporting and creating a gateway for creativity. It’s also about creators, that accessibility can support people with disabilities, particularly those in this conversation who are blind, partially sighted, visually impaired, to be able to be creative and to showcase that you, as somebody with a disability, can be a creator in this industry, whether it’s working for a brand such as Coca-Cola or other major brand out there or a small startup or an ad agency. Candidly, disappointingly, there are few people who are blind or partially sighted that I’m aware of that work at brands or at agencies. And so when it comes to accessibility, we are at a wonderful time to be able to see how accessibility can support and make more accessible creative assets, but also to be able to support creators, to dream up anything that you want to, and to be able to work in a place that allows you, whether it’s working fully remote, or amongst colleagues in an office, to be able to have accommodations and accessibility to support you as a creator in this industry. That’s an opportunity, hopefully, I’d like to convey that disability and accessibility can support both creators and the creative itself.

CAROLINE DESROSIERS: Yeah, it’s a wonderful time because we’re not at the beginning anymore. We’re in it. We’re in the middle. We’re seeing examples out there and people really working hard at these roles. For organizations that still feel new to this, though, these marketing campaigns can seem challenging to implement. They may seem that way and it may actually involve hard work, but it’s good work and we like hard work, right? We need to design these workflows and kind of pull apart the complexity of these procedures that impact our teams. We need to figure out how to overcome these barriers that we know are leading us to these missed opportunities. We need to figure out how to overcome these barriers that we know are leading us to these missed opportunities. We need to figure out how to overcome these barriers that we know are leading us to these missed opportunities. Of reaching our audiences and businesses simply can’t afford to let accessibility fall through the cracks or to wait any longer to fill it, fill figure this out, because there’s this healthy competition happening out there. So I think, you know, a lot of challenges, of course, ahead of us to solve. But of the good news is that we have all the tools we need to fix the problem and we have experts that can figure this out. So every step in this digital marketing process, as you’ve as you’ve seen today, it needs our attention from brand to agency to platform to technology, production, all of it. We need to look at every single step and figure out how does this work to put accessibility back into our processes and our products where it really should have always been from the beginning. So hopefully this session got you thinking about how you can take the next steps in turning insights into action for your marketing campaigns or for leveling them up. Maybe you’ve worked on accessibility before. Let’s see that great creative come out in 2025. And if you need guidance, reach out to us. We’ve done this before. We can help you take shortcuts. And I’m just so grateful that we had this conversation today. Thank you to our awesome group of panelists and also to the audience for your attention to this important topic. Thanks, everyone. And back to you. Karae and Ross and the Sight Tech Global team.

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