Re: [EXT] Re: AI and the future of Web accessibility Guidelines

Work that some of us are doing in other groups like the accessibility internationalization and equity community groups will be worth reflecting upon. Looking to those who’ve been traditionally excluded from these conversations is also key. They’re being left out of many conversations. Timnit Gehru’s DAIR is another organization worth listening to.

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________________________________
From: Gregg Vanderheiden RTF <gregg@raisingthefloor.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 4, 2024 11:44:01 AM
To: Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk>
Cc: w3c-waI-gl@w3. org <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Subject: [EXT] Re: AI and the future of Web accessibility Guidelines

You asked — when does it end? wow — I hope it ends with us not having to do anything (or almost nothing) with regard to accessibility regulations for ICT because each individual gets information and interface presented to them that is optimized

You asked — when does it end?

wow — I hope it ends with us not having to do anything (or almost nothing) with regard to accessibility regulations for ICT because each individual gets information and interface presented to them that is optimized for them as an individual !

we currently have a huge set of rules that are followed by almost no-one.   ( a small percentage of products)

and even then, our own guidelines (and WCAG 3 will too ) say if you follow all these, it will still not be accessible to many

We need to look at all options — in order to reach where we need to (or get a LOT closer than we are now)

  *   ALL ICT
  *   Accessible to ALL users who are capable of understanding it (e.g. not everyone will be able to understand and operate a quantum scanning electron microscope — but they should be able to operate a viewer of the results) and have a need to use it.

g



On Apr 4, 2024, at 5:08 AM, Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk> wrote:

On 04/04/2024 08:02, Gregg Vanderheiden RTF wrote:
I think much of our work is not forward-looking.
We will soon have AI that can do a better job of text alternatives than humans can for example.
And then it is unclear why we would require authors to do all this work.
This applies to a LOT of things.

As a counterpoint, Gregg ... when does it end? You've stated similar when it comes to things like authors needing to provide correct explicit markup for headings, since (to paraphrase) "AI will be able to do it".

Captions, audio descriptions ... "AI will be able to do it".

Colour contrast issues? "AI can detect it and change it on the fly".

Once you bring in the "AI will do it" line of thinking, we may as well just remove any author requirement, and WCAG becomes just a list of requirements for AI user agents to massage any old web content into something accessible.

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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