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For disabled users, AI possibilities to improve accessibility to digital products and workflows are attractive, provided that the principles of inclusiveness are cooked in its design from the start.
There are important crossings with the way AI is deployed today and some of the basic precepts associated with digital accessibility. For many consumers, AI is a matter of productivity and efficiency hacks – by making tasks simpler thanks to automation and high personalization levels. The same ideas can also be applied to accessibility.
Speed and efficiency
Nowadays, the AI can make important praceration in tasks such as the generation of automatic text and audio alt descriptions for visually impaired and real-time subtitles for people with hearing loss, summarizing and simplifying web content and documents for learning or cognitive people and home or voice automation or gesture systems. Very soon, based on research and products available today, brain interfaces powered by AI can help users Get around sensory limitationsWhile robotic systems could help with daily tasks and reduce the cost of care.
These are only some of the ways in which artificial intelligence can overeat accessibility now and, in the future, but what about the accessibility of the interfaces themselves?
Like the models of large languages such as GPT – 4O of Openai, the Gemini of Google and the Claude d’Anthropic are based on conversational interfaces, the entry / exit communication methods are essential to accessibility in this context. For tools using direct vocal input, this may include the possibility of recognizing non -typical speech, as individuals with an obstacle to speech. Likewise, people with autistic people and other forms of neurodiversity can both supervise the questions they ask in LLM in different ways and require answers with personalized shaping and levels of detail.
Additional points of pain may include the absence of language and inclusive concepts of disability in model training data and lack of codessin and user tests with the community of disabled people before launching new products. Something as simple as the accessibility of mediocre screen readers can still dog LLM, despite their sophistication and advanced capacities, in the same way that those who have a loss of vision encountered static web pages more than two decades.
Build the Internet of the future
Speaking of web pages, which is just as important but often steals under the radar in contrast to more intriguing futuristic aspects, such as brain interfaces and robotics, is the capacity of AI to finish a large part of the lifting of heavy when it comes to coding websites and applications of the future. During a call for results at the end of last year, the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai revealed that More than 25% of the new Google code was generated by artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, in a recent interview with the podcast with Dwarkesh Patel, the meta-PDG Mark Zuckerberg has suggested that most of the company code will be Finished by AI Over the next 12 to 18 months, adding that very soon AI agents will be able to exceed the elite coders of the technology giant.
In recognition of this courageous new reality, Joe Devon, co-founder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, who is celebrated each year on Thursday May, designed a new innovative LLM accessibility auditorwhich was launched jointly with this year GAAD. The Open-Source initiative is known as Aimac, which means an accessibility auditor on AI and implies collaboration between the World Accessibility Awareness and User Interface and Digital ServiceNow Digital Work Flow.
Aimac allows testers to assess how the different models react to different guests, such as those linked to the design of web pages, layout and semantic structure, by analyzing and analyzing the accessibility parameters of the HTML code returned to what other LLMs are able to produce.
“When you ask an AI to write code for you, it can be accessible or inaccessible,” said Devon during an interview.
“To move forward, because the systems will do so much code, I felt that it was really important to be able to compare how accessible the different models are. We have the servicenow support to create and open it, which is so key because, for better accessible work you have a business. democratize the entire landscape of accessibility coding for LLM. »»
ServiceNow has introduced new AI capabilities in its product offers in recent months, including more advanced vocal features. The company’s vice-president and the head of world accessibility, Eamon Mcerlean, is a long-term employee with Devon, and the couple co-host Accessibility and podcast Gen Ai.
Mcerlean firmly believes that although the relative subtleties of the accessibility of the entry / exit mechanisms of generative AI models are essential, it is within the framework of the wider image of the development of AI in which the greatest threats to accessibility and equality are found.
“Accessibility was afterwards for many years in the world .com,” explains Mcerlean.
“Fortunately, many companies have since jumped to resolve and catch up.
Back in the last stages of the .com era, which helped to remove the accessibility of being considered as an expensive burden, it is its double establishment as a legally protected human right as well as being a competitive advantage for those who wanted to invest in it. Hopefully, whatever the frantic pace of AI current developments, these same principles will be held again. In order for our AI future to be really inclusive, accessibility must not only serve as a design principle, but also be a fundamental requirement – integrated into the code itself supplying the digital world.
