Meetup Details
Excerpt from the UX ChCh Meetup site.
Did you know 1 in 4 New Zealanders have a disability? That’s 1.1 million people! Yet only 3% of kiwi organisations are meeting accessibility standards. Can AI be the answer to making our digital assets more accessible? This talk explores the benefits and pitfalls of AI in achieving accessibility. We’ll look at real world cases of how AI can be used to help accessibility initiatives, and areas where we need to be weary. How can we leverage this new technology to increase access? Hint: it’s not what you think!
As always, thank you to Andrew Pitts and MadeCurious for hosting the event!
About Maia Miller
Meet Maia, the Web Accessibility Specialist with a passion for making the digital world inclusive for everyone. As an IAAP certified professional, Maia brings a wealth of expertise and knowledge to the table. With a background as a skilled web developer working in Agile with multiple job roles, she possesses an insider’s understanding of the intricacies of website design and development.
Accessibility is all about context
This was a key point of the talk. AI is not great at computing context, it can only work with patterns and the information it knows.
The parts of AI that are simple to automate are the more objective pieces around content and colour contrast. Once those are tested (which can be done in an automated way), how do you test for the trickier bits that require more context? If you’re testing tab order, what determines success or failure, for example?
Version 3 is in process but some say it’s still not ready for prime time. WCAG says it’s still working on it, but the standard suffers from the same issue that testers do – It’s difficult to quantify all the contexts that are possible when humans interact with the web.
How to achieve accessible design through AI?
Currently AI struggles to deal with all the different contexts possible, so it’s not very mature in this area. However, the way is clear for enterprising and entrepreneurial people to come along and disrupt the space. It will take very specific training to get it past the point of testing colour contrast and page content and hierarchy.
Current thinking is you train a dedicated AI model to understand accessibility and test for it. As a designer, you will need to know about the AOM, or Accessibility Object Model (a subset of the Document Object Model) and how screenreaders read it instead of the DOM.
Read more of my posts about Accessibility.
Read my Accessibility Statement. Then create your own!
Some helpful tools
Maia presented some really helpful tools when testing for accessibility issues:
- Scribely bulk alt image generation.
- Be My Eyes – Let’s see the world together. Be My Eyes connects blind or low vision users who want assistance, with volunteers and companies across the world, through live video and AI.
- Be My AI – Introducing: Be My AI. Be My Eyes’ Virtual Volunteer, powered by GPT-4, gets a new name and will soon be open to beta testing by hundreds of iOS users worldwide
There are other tools I’m familiar with which can help you test for accessibility:
Thank you Maia, and MadeCurious, for a great event!
