Beware of Vibe Accessibility

Number of words: 677.

(Loaded 674 times)

Vibe Coding is here and it’s amazing. It started a new era where it seems that make your own software is now often a better choice compared to buying it. But – please beware.

Vibe coding is amazing. It is possible because we now have the tools that integrate Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in tools that, not only allow us to generate code, but also debug and run the code. Making coding much more approachable, also for people that don’t know how to code.

But – this speed increasing revolution also comes with acceleration of potential and often also very real problems. GenAI is “borrowing” (I could use stealing, but it is sometimes difficult to prove as we can’t really be sure when there are no direct references) code from all over the place. Mainly from open source (but as it seems GenAI providers crawl all kinds of websites and some of them even ignore when we ask them not to crawl our content (opens in new window)). And if it was not clear before – it should be now – all our free code repositories (that are only free if the license is open source) were and are used to teach machines to learn to code. This means that GenAI is trained on official documentation (which is often not very extensive) and a lot of open source (which is abundant and now grows even more due to GenAI and vibe coding). It means that our use of GenAI drastically reinforces it’s own biases (that were there from before).

Which brings me to accessibility.

Just recently I wrote about WebAIMs million – a large scale automatic accessibility testing project – which indicates some progress, but still reports that 94.8% of million webpages tested failed at least one of automatically detectable WCAG success criteria.

Majority of websites are based on open source elements and components with their derivations – or even whole frameworks and their derivations. This is the normal – there are millions of packages available for quick use and reuse (opens in new window), and to be more productive we all love to use them to deliver faster.

With vibe coding it’s obvious that the number of packages used and the number of new packages will only rise. Which is a good thing for the web at first glance.

But…

We need to make sure things are accessible. And this is my concern. With current situation of inaccessible webpages and mobile apps, with inaccessible components and frameworks and using the GenAI to generate quicker we risk to increase the inaccessibility (and yes, also other vital things like security (opens in new window)).

And another important thing. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are somehow well represented in online sources, so GenAI is a bit more familiar with them. But when it comes to EN 301 549, the European Accessibility guidelines (that extend WCAG with additional criteria and are directly related to European Accessibility Act) sources are quite limited. This means that if you want your solution to respect EN 301 549, chances are even poorer.

So – Vibe Accessibility is a dangerous thing because of multiple facts. Most dangerously – because GenAI is over-confident and because without domain specialist knowledge we can’t trust the final product. Besides extreme General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) risks (imagine hackers stealing your clients data), we need also to consider accessibility risks – mostly because we will most probably exclude some groups of people if we just trust GenAI – but also because of legislation impacts like for example European Accessibility Act.

Once again – I can’t deny the positive effects of vibe coding, but please include security and accessibility subject matter specialists before you go to far. In an ideal world we would all have the possibility to include them early on, and co-design with them (and people with disabilities), but if you can’t do that, at least make sure you are not leaking personal data and you are not discriminating people with disabilities.

Author: Bogdan Cerovac

I am IAAP certified Web Accessibility Specialist (from 2020) and was Google certified Mobile Web Specialist.

Work as digital agency co-owner web developer and accessibility lead.

Sole entrepreneur behind IDEA-lab Cerovac (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility lab) after work. Check out my Accessibility Services if you want me to help your with digital accessibility.

Also head of the expert council at Institute for Digital Accessibility A11Y.si (in Slovenian).

Living and working in Norway (🇳🇴), originally from Slovenia (🇸🇮), loves exploring the globe (🌐).

Nurturing the web from 1999, this blog from 2019.

More about me and how to contact me:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *