I would happily wager on the amount of *good quality* accessibility generated. Would you like to wager on how often LLMs will be used as an excuse to downgrade or outright dump human accessibility work? And how many disabled people will be unable to afford LLMs and so will be locked out of the supposed accessibility benefits of using them? Would you care to wager on how the quality of the "accessibility" generated will change over time, as models degenerate when they run out of training data?

And would you like to think about how much accessibility is being generated for people who aren't Anglophones, or how the decline in accessibility as a human-based task in the Anglosphere will affect capacity, training, status, and resourcing for accessibility work in other languages and cultural contexts? If disabled, white Anglophones gain some low-quality accessibility while it disappears for other disabled people, will you notice? Will you claim you won the wager if people like you think the accessibility has increased?

Demands have been ongoing for decades, and as you note, only "...meagre tools
are offered to them."

And we should keep fighting for that to change. Accepting the slops from the AI bucket as a substitute for real accessibility is not a win. Not for anyone. It's a distraction; a way to pacify us so we'll stop demanding real change. Worse than that, it's a way to persuade the non-disabled that accessibility is improving, so that they'll be less inclined to listen to us when we ask for more.

But I am pleading with this community to stop repeating the lie that there is any genuine desire to improve accessibility in what the LLM companies are doing, or that their slops are an acceptable substitute for proper, human-authored, human-focused accessibility. Just please stop claiming disabled people as an excuse to justify the existence of LLMs.

As my physical abilities diminish, I'll take accessibility. (full stop)

Feel free to keep thinking only about your own short-term needs. I'll keep fighting for the rights of all my fellow disabled people, as I have been doing for many years.

Regards,

Bethan

****************************************************

Dr. Bethan Tovey-Walsh

linguacelta.com

Golygydd | Editor geirfan.cymru

Croeso i chi ysgrifennu ataf yn y Gymraeg

On 30 May 2026, at 16:45, patrick@durusau.net wrote:

Bethan,

On 2026-05-30 11:30, Bethan Tovey-Walsh wrote:

I don't blame individual disabled people for taking advantage of the
meagre tools that are offered to them. But anyone claiming that it is
*a good thing* for LLMs to be used in this way, instead of demanding
proper funding and attention to accessibility work, is displaying an
ableist attitude towards accessibility.

Would you care to wager on the amount of accessibility created by LLMs
over the next five years, versus demanding proper funding and attention
to accessibility work?

Demands have been ongoing for decades, and as you note, only "...meagre tools
are offered to them."

As my physical abilities diminish, I'll take accessibility. (full stop)

Hope you are having a great weekend!

Patrick