AI Musings
This week, I've been thinking a lot about the downstream effects of AI on access literacy in blindness spaces. I've seen at least three bespoke email clients show up now, built with accessibility in mind and, at least in large part, with AI. Which is great! If you can make the thing that works better for you, why wouldn't you? Bespoke fixes for inaccessible software obviously aren't new. Screen reader vendors still write scripts for applications that otherwise work terribly. As an example, the built-in set of JAWS scripts is a veritable who's who of business applications. We've been fixing software from the outside for decades. The difference, I think, is where the fix sits in the stack. A JAWS script makes Outlook usable. Numerous NVDA add-ons exist to enhance other productivity apps, too. Ideally, the company fixes the problem themselves. Despite the accessibility issues--and usually because of the fixes--people are still using the mainstream solution. But now it's becoming practical to just make a different email client or word processor. (Yes, I know blind-centric word processors aren't new.) This is where my spidey senses start niggling a little. A lot of being a competent blind computer user is knowing how to deal with software that sucks. Finding the weird workaround, knowing enough about how a screen reader works to poke at something another way, using deductive reasoning to figure out what button is what when the obvious route is broken. These aren't skills we should need, but they are skills that make one effective in school and professional life. Until fairly recently, scarcity and necessity more or less guaranteed we'd learn them. Nobody had the time or money to make a bespoke accessible version of every piece of software they encountered. Even when somebody wrote a script or add-on to make something better, we were generally still operating in the same software everyone else was using. So, what happens to a blind person 5-10 years away who's been handed purpose-built tools whenever something is annoying or inaccessible, then gets a corporate job and is dumped head-first into Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, Google Workspace, and whatever random harebrained internal software dominates in that decade? 1/2
AI Musings
You don't get to vibe-code your employer a new Microsoft Office. You may not even get to install another email client. At some point you're back to dealing with the software that's in front of you, except maybe you never had much reason to learn how. Not only that, but if the default solution is the bespoke tool, companies won't know about problems because they don't get reported. Maybe by then we'll be so AI-pilled that we just sit at our computers and prompt local AI to read our emails and that will be the only user interface, in which case... I have many other concerns.
I'm certainly not suggesting blind people should suffer through bad software for character building. I want people making things that work for them--I'm sending this message from a bespoke accessibility-first Mastodon client.
AI may make it possible to build one accessible thing after another until we're barely interacting with the mainstream software at all. Maybe that's much better for the person using it. But if everyone else is learning Outlook and Excel and Google Docs while we're learning purpose-built substitutes, we're increasingly not learning the same things. What happens when accessibility moves from adapting the mainstream to opting out of it. I have no idea. 2/2
