{"id":1888,"date":"2025-03-02T19:35:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-02T18:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/?p=1888"},"modified":"2025-03-04T08:12:22","modified_gmt":"2025-03-04T07:12:22","slug":"mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-who-is-the-fairest-ai-for-accessibility-of-them-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/2025\/03\/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-who-is-the-fairest-ai-for-accessibility-of-them-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest AI (for accessibility) of them all"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Without a doubt &#8211; artificial intelligence <a href=\"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/2024\/09\/be-careful-when-using-generative-artificial-intelligence-to-produce-code\/\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"1548\">(AI) &#8211; seems to be changing our lives (for better and for worse<\/a>, as it&#8217;s often the case with technology). And AI will, without a doubt change accessibility, also for better and for worse, it seems. It seems that it&#8217;s all around us, added to more and more software products and services and in some cases causing big changes &#8211; from people dropping the usual websites and just using a chat interface to products that can automate interactions with computer operating system, browser and mobile applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Let&#8217;s stop for a moment and check some of the current predictions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Some claim that AI will automatically fix all accessibility issues<\/strong> (they claim this for years and some of them also got financial fines because of these false claims).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Others claim that accessibility is &#8220;dead&#8221; as we will all just consume tailored interfaces and\/or automate all interactions with computers<\/strong> so that they will just work instead of us.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Some now claim they will fully automate accessibility testing<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Different aspects with a common denominator &#8211; AI &#8211; but using different approaches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;ve been using AI for coding some time now, and <strong>I appreciate off-loading all the grunt tasks<\/strong>, sometimes even use it as a sparing partner, but <strong>the more I use it &#8211; the more I see that it can&#8217;t be fully trusted<\/strong>. Now &#8211; you can say that this is just a temporary thing and it will get better and better &#8211; and I want to believe you. And I see progress, sometimes, but then next prompt destroys it again. And so on and on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When I manually filter out the noise it sometimes produces <strong>it helps me code faster<\/strong>. But &#8211; even when I explicitly specify all accessibility requirements and even provide verified documentation and examples from sources I trust, even when I use custom models filled with those valuable and trustworthy sources, I still see mistakes and issues and that makes me wonder. Sure, organizations with lots of manually verified data have better chances, but I still can&#8217;t trust a tool that is sometimes good and sometimes bad &#8211; with same input.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With <a href=\"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/2024\/03\/latest-webaims-million-some-thoughts\/\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"1581\">95,9% of webpages out there having automatically detectable WCAG issues<\/a>, with all the open source <a href=\"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/2020\/11\/accessibility-considerations-when-using-or-developing-custom-controls-and-widgets\/\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"588\">packages claiming they conform to WCAG<\/a> but actually don&#8217;t even state what was tested, with <a href=\"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/2024\/01\/are-human-powered-accessibility-overlays-really-the-future\/\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"1481\">overlays blocking testing tools and claiming conformance<\/a> and with built in biases &#8211; I can only say that I need to remain skeptical of all those claims of AI hype. It&#8217;s just not healthy to lie to myself, but I want to remain an optimist and wait to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another consideration that is often left out of this kind of debates is how these claims may also bring a lot of bad things. People before me already reflected on them &#8211; built in <strong>biases <\/strong>will hurt even more people, <strong>funding <\/strong>for human resources will be redirected to products or minimized as &#8220;we will just let AI do it&#8221;, some organizations will most probably <strong>just buy a product <\/strong>instead of integrating inclusion and accessibility into their culture and we risk to make the accessibility gap even larger if people will need to buy another <strong>subscription to make their experience accessible<\/strong> when it should already be accessible in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I can&#8217;t predict the future, but it seems that others think they can &#8211; can&#8217;t claim that I know their reasons, but we need to ask them that they don&#8217;t try to use hypothetical solutions for real problems that discriminate people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even if AI consumes all written and recorded knowledge it will still miss on millions of years of evolution that got us here and is a part of us as a race, not to even mention our diversity as an individuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>AI race is amazing, without doubt, a lot can be automated, but I am certain that we will continue to need human supervision or else risk problems. And inaccessibility can sometimes mean a wrong button label and sometimes a barrier that shuts people out completely. So &#8211; I still trust myself more than any AI &#8211; or at least I know when to ask for help which is often not the case with overconfident predictive pretrained models that &#8220;know everything and beyond&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A lot of opinions, a lot of academic studies, some lab testing, too little feedback from people with disabilities and too much hype &#8211; I need to add.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[780,614,850,65],"tags":[546,80,61,29],"class_list":["post-1888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accessibility-in-organizations","category-accessibility-innovation","category-ai-and-a11y","category-future-of-a11y","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-en-301-549","tag-future","tag-wcag"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1888\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}