How AI Tools are Transforming Accessibility in Education and Everyday Life
As AI rapidly evolves, one community is seeing unique benefits of AI; Disability. AI tools are revolutionizing how folks with disabilities navigate school, work, and everyday activities. Features like live transcription and facial recognition are revolutionizing assistive technology and making digital materials more accessible. Today, we’re looking at some ways AI is impacting the community.
Education
While the effects of AI on general student populations has been widely documented, AI is also having a profound impact on disabled students. Accessible Technology Initiative employee India West has had firsthand experience with Otter AI, a tool that transcribes speech in real time, helping her navigate work with a visual impairment. It allows her to take notes more easily and provides her the opportunity to refer back to meetings at later times, either through listening to recordings of the meeting or reading an automated summary sent to her email.
In December, the Associated Press highlighted Makenzie Gilkison, a 14-year-old dyslexic student who saw a turnaround in her academic performance thanks in part to her use of a customized AI chatbot that could read for her, increasing her reading comprehension. Her story is far from unique.
Students who struggle with grappling concepts at the same speed as their peers have seen the benefits of chatbots. Chatbots can explain problems or concepts to students in multiple ways, providing 1-to-1 support that many students have been lacking, similar to Makenzie.
With this in mind, companies and educational organizations are fast-tracking digital tools to assist disabled people with digital accessibility. Currently, researchers at the University of Kansas are developing and expanding a program that will give teachers new capabilities powered by AI to help students with disabilities improve their writing skills with immediate scoring and feedback. In February, former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati announced an AI startup aimed at making AI more accessible and usable.
Other companies such as Adobe are integrating AI into their existing software. In 2023, they introduced cloud-based auto-tagging into Acrobat, their PDF editor. This feature allows for more efficient remediation, as this tool will automatically detect features like tables or lists in PDFs, and tag them as such automatically. Colleges and other higher education institutions are utilizing AI for captions and audio descriptions for media, making these compliances more efficient and less costly to achieve.
Everyday Life
The ways AI is impacting Accessibility go further than just the classroom. Many individuals are seeing the effects in their everyday activities. One of the most impactful changes AI has had on the community is real-time facial recognition and visual descriptions. Tools like SeeingAI and OrCam are able to recognize objects like faces and text, and provide audio descriptions to those with visual impairments. Text-to-speech apps VoiceItt and Predictable help individuals with Cerebral Palsy or ALS communicate faster through the use of predictive text and rate enhancement tools. WheelMap allows users to see wheelchair-accessible areas near them. Apps like ReSound can block out background noise for those with hearing impairments or neurodivergence.
Along with physical technologies, digital technologies are evolving as well. In January, OpenAI announced the preview launch of Operator, a program that can navigate the web for users using prompts or voice commands. In theory, this may evolve into a program that allows disabled users to navigate websites without having to visit them manually. Currently, this program is in research phase and available to users in a limited capacity with ChatGPT’s Pro subscription.
AI is having wider reaches as well. AI is being leveraged in healthcare to help with diagnoses, as well as in apps for home use like Woebot or Wysa. Some companies have created financial accessibility tools such as Oportun, an app that automatically pulls money from checking accounts to savings accounts based on analyses of spending habits, which can be beneficial to people with cognitive disabilities.
Accessibility Standards
Creators and professionals are also reaping the benefits of AI use. AI tools are helping to streamline the process of checking for and tweaking websites and other digital materials for accessibility compliance. Tools like the GPT “Accessibility Copilot” review code for compliance with WCAG standards. Other AI tools, such as Ask Microsoft Accessibility, can provide users with feedback and ideas on how to utilize accessibility functions on their products.
Conclusion
The transformative potential of AI for the disability community represents a promising frontier of technological innovation, offering unprecedented tools for communication, learning, and personal empowerment. As these technologies continue to evolve, they hold the potential to significantly reduce barriers and create more inclusive experiences across multiple aspects of daily life.
