From the typewriter to recorded sound, accessibility researchers often end up making technology better for everyone. Together, with creators and allies in the accessibility community, we made Creatability, a set of 8 experiments that explore how creative tools – drawing, music and more – can be made more accessible using web and AI technology. They’re just a start, we hope these experiments inspire others to unleash their inner artist regardless of ability. That’s why we’re open sourcing the code and creating helpful guides as starting points for people to create their own projects.

An exciting design challenge, as an accessibility-focused project, was to make the design as universal as possible, accommodating all inputs and outputs. So anyone can interact with these experiments in lots of ways: voice, body, keyboard, switch devices, and more. And output was equally important, for example making sure spoken and sound outputs were thoughtfully designed for visually impaired users.

What’s really exciting is that even though it made the design process even more challenging and difficult, thinking carefully about all users from the beginning yielded even better, simpler designs. And that’s one of our key design learnings that we hope can extend to all of our future projects and inspire other projects.