Blind internet users struggle with error-prone AI aids

This news hit the accessibility community like a ton of bricks. Overlays have been seen as worse than useless among accessibility professionals, so it was a huge shock that a reputable provider would have acquired an overlay company. The structure of the transaction was also weird (the CEO of the target company purchased stock in the acquirer as part of the transaction).

Soon thereafter news broke that another accessibility rockstar was joining AudioEye (a company similar to UserWay). [1]

I imagine that the dam may be breaking and tech-enabled solutions may not be viewed in as bad a light as before.

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenaquino/2024/01/31/new-aud...

It would be comical if it weren't so sad that software were making lives worse, not better.

There are a vast number of sites that are largely LLM generated that exist to deliver adverts. Basically, the old school link farms have evolved into automatically generated content farms.

For example, if you search for a few IT technical terms you will often get a lot of blog style returns. They will often look like a Word Press site with a selection from a colour and font scheme. With luck you will find some Stack overflow posts and with the Good Lord (pick your deity) looking down, you might get some real content.

The situation for finding and engaging on the internet is pretty dire and if one or more of your faculties are a bit shag ... really dire.

Perhaps what we need is some sort of Open Access to add to Open Source. I have deliberately picked Access even though its been sort of taken by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access

The Access I envisage is actual ability to access something. The other effort might consider Open Research or similar instead.