Artificial Intelligence and Digital Accessibility | Opportunities and Challenges with an Expert

Karine
Hello Jean-Baptiste, how are you?

Jean-Baptiste
Hello. Good, I'm doing well, thank you.

Karine
Jean-Baptiste, you work with Ciao in accessibility. Can you tell us a little about your background?

Jean-Baptiste
I have about fifteen years of web development before coming to work with Ciao. I've been in web accessibility for 1 year with Ciao.

Karine
So Jean-Baptiste, artificial intelligence is a leading digital technology that is rapidly on the rise. It's the technology everyone has been talking about for more than a year. In your opinion, what are the impacts of artificial intelligence on web accessibility?

Jean-Baptiste
Actually, first of all, the responses when you ask questions to AI, the responses are subject to interpretation, you always have to verify them. That's the issue I have with AI — when people aggregate documents, aggregate information via AI, will they be able to verify the response themselves? I don't know. There's also the display, which for now is mainly text-based. But what if that changes.

Karine
Indeed, what I see is that we could draw a parallel with today's internet, which started in a very text-based form — so very accessible — and then as it evolved it became so dynamic and so visual that we need assistive technology to browse it when you're visually impaired.

Jean-Baptiste
Exactly.

Karine
How do you see artificial intelligence potentially helping in terms of accessibility, for example in the development of accessible content?

Jean-Baptiste
As a developer, I've been using AI for work for several years. AI is a tool — if you ask it to produce accessible content, over time it will succeed in delivering accessible content, it will succeed in applying accessibility rules. So at that level, I think it can help developers enormously in creating baseline accessible content, without replacing human verification, because all content is subject to verification. But the more an AI is trained in accessibility, the more accessible — and effective and relevant — the content it produces will be. There are a few examples where it currently falls short, like detecting colors for contrast. AI is very poor at that, but that's starting to get resolved as models are being trained on it. For me, AI can help with accessibility, can help produce a large amount of accessible content in a short time. So that's a good thing that is starting to happen.

Karine
Can you tell us about your experience with an image carousel?

Jean-Baptiste
It's fairly simple. Just this morning, a colleague asked me how to make an accessible carousel, and I tried for a few minutes to explain in writing how to build an accessible carousel, and I realized that ultimately a tangible example — a plain HTML example — would be more effective than a long text. So I asked AI to create an accessible carousel. It produced a carousel, but the carousel was not accessible. The first draft of its carousel was not accessible and didn't match what I wanted it to do. So I had to go back to the AI several times to say this particular detail is not accessible. And each time the AI would say, yes you're right. Yes you're right. And that's one of the major flaws of AI — if you don't know how to verify the information, it can be problematic.

Karine
Because what I understand from that experience is that we can currently think of artificial intelligence somewhat like an intern you need to supervise — in the sense that AI has a production capacity that is really interesting, but it doesn't have all the knowledge or expertise needed to produce something of quality on the first try. Like an intern.

Jean-Baptiste
I would rather use the term black box, because it's less of a slight on interns. For me, AI is a black box. You feed it something and you expect a result in return, and in between you don't know what's going to happen. You have control over what you give it and you have control over the result, the output. And indeed, for now AI will not replace humans. We are nowhere near the rise of the machines. You constantly have to verify what AI produces, and that raises a problem — if the person asking it to produce content doesn't know the subject matter, they won't be able to verify it. That's where I think AI can actually be a bit of a hindrance.

Karine
Essentially, artificial intelligence is not an expert system. So it doesn't come with expertise you can rely on. It comes with an execution capability that needs to be supervised.

Jean-Baptiste
Exactly. It's actually a massive encyclopedia that doesn't know what it's doing. You just open the encyclopedia, say give me this definition, and it will give you the definition without a problem — but it won't know how to interpret it.

Karine
Interpretation. Indeed, good point. So based on all of this, the big question — is artificial intelligence an accelerator or an amplifier of problems?

Jean-Baptiste
That's a good question. It can be both. It can be a problem amplifier. Web accessibility is already fairly poorly respected on the internet. If you use AI without understanding all the ins and outs, it can make the situation worse. But you also have to see the positive side of this tool — if you know what you're asking of it, if you're not an expert but you're knowledgeable on the subject, you can verify the result, and therefore use AI to produce accessible content. But that means developers who use AI will need to be trained in WCAG principles before using AI.

Karine
So you need a minimum level of knowledge to be able to effectively use artificial intelligence to oversee the production of accessible content.

Jean-Baptiste
It's actually to oversee content production in general, accessible content included.

Karine
Yes, absolutely. Very good point. Great. Thank you very much Jean-Baptiste for your insights and your perspective on artificial intelligence and accessibility. We invite people to consult the guide on the accessibility lifecycle, which will be in the video notes, and to come talk to us about their accessibility projects. We'd love to discuss that with you. Jean-Baptiste.

Jean-Baptiste
Thank you. Have a great day.