Design A11y.

Design A11y is an AI accessibility checker inside Smartsheet's dashboard builder. As someone is creating a dashboard, it reviews contrast, font legibility, chart readability, and alt text against WCAG standards in real time. It separates critical issues from items that need a manual call, and offers one-click fixes for everything resolvable. For images and charts, it generates alt text so screen readers can interpret them. We built it modular by design, so the same engine can extend into forms, documents, and brand platforms later.

Smartsheet dashboards are creative tools. Anyone can build one, and most builders are not designers. The freedom to pick any color, any font, any chart configuration means accessibility is easy to miss. Design A11y exists so that the person building a dashboard does not need to be an accessibility expert to ship one that everyone can use.

Accessibility is normally a downstream check. By the time anyone audits, the builder has already shared their dashboard across the organization, often with dozens of colleagues and collaborators relying on it. Design A11y moves the check upstream into the moment of creation, and turns the most common accessibility failures into one-click fixes. The same idea generalizes well beyond visual impairment, which is why we built it modular in the first place.

Design A11y is currently behind a feature flag, releasing alongside the Smartsheet Dashboard modernization. In the meantime, the work has been recognized externally. Fast Company named it an Innovation by Design Honoree in 2024. The W3 Awards gave it Gold. The Industrial Designers Society of America featured the work in its Member Spotlight series. Recognition from those three is meaningful for a feature still pre-GA. The adoption data will come once it ships.

Tinyverse is the side I keep coming back to. It's an AI storytelling app I'm building for children with autism, around what their parents and therapists actually need. Building it is my way of putting AI to good use on a problem that doesn't usually get the attention enterprise software does. The same instinct made Design A11y feel obvious to me as soon as I saw the gap inside the dashboard builder. Social impact technology is the through-line, and the work I want to keep growing into.