Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Add impact on accessibility #24

Open
LJWatson opened this issue Apr 3, 2024 · 2 comments
Open

Add impact on accessibility #24

LJWatson opened this issue Apr 3, 2024 · 2 comments
Labels
enhancement New feature or request

Comments

@LJWatson
Copy link

LJWatson commented Apr 3, 2024

Generative AI is already having a systemic impact on accessibility on the Web, and W3C needs to understand the positive and negative effects it's having.

For example, generative AI is used in browsers, websites, and apps, to provide descriptions of images for anyone unable to see them.

Despite their tendancy to hallucinate, the rapid evolution of LLM and tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, have effectively made any image on the Web accessible to blind people. To put this into context, according to the WebAIM Million report the homepages of the top one million websites have an average of 55.5 images and 21.6% of those are missing text descriptions.

The same technologies are also being used to sell products that claim to make websites instantly accessible. Jakob Nielsen takes it a step further, claiming that accessibility has failed in its current form and that generative AI will solve everything.

These products do not accomplish all they claim, and (I think) Nielsen needs to think again, but generative AI is constantly evolving and the appeal of instant and affordable accessibility is not going to go away.

As the organization at the forefront of accessibility on the Web for nearly 30 years, W3C undoubtedly has a role to play in understanding and responding to these systemic changes - and perhaps a certain amount of self-reflection about the role its played in creating a Web that has these gaps that generative AI is being used to close or worse, where generative AI is used to sell solutions that claim to close them with more confidence than they should.

@LJWatson LJWatson added the enhancement New feature or request label Apr 3, 2024
@cynthia
Copy link
Member

cynthia commented Apr 8, 2024

There is also the case to be made for different accessibility needs as well; speech to text transcription is already deployed in the wild which provides text descriptions for audio content. Cognitive accessibility needs could also be served through text models (e.g. please rephrase this in simple english, please summarize for two simple examples).

While both have limits on the guarantees in terms of bias and accuracy, there is definite promise for incremental progress for both cases.

@dontcallmedom
Copy link
Member

for future reference (including my own since I haven't read it through yet) https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2024AprJun/thread.html#msg5

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
enhancement New feature or request
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

3 participants