Instead of making every website accessible → AI-powered 100%-accessible browsers | Hacker News Reader

Instead of making every website accessible → AI-powered 100%-accessible browsers

3 pointsmgav9 comments

Respectfully, it’s not very helpful to develop 10,000 rules and standards that are nearly impossible for creators of all 200 million active worldwide websites to even comprehend.

Instead, the most helpful way to advance accessibility is to find easy solutions for implementation.

For example, instead of making all 200 websites accessible, which is obviously failing, why not make browsers, like Chrome, Firefox and Safari, implement AI-powered “make-accessible” mode, that makes even a zero-percent accessible website 100% perfectly accessible in real-time?

If the U.S. Gov't funded an open source solution with $15 million to finish in 12 months, then $2 million per year for future development, and gave it away for free to any browser builder, the entire accessibility issue would be SOLVED!

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Have you looked at the rules and standards? Last time I delft with Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 there were less then 100 rules. I think you have a point about to many standards, but I'm pretty sure most of the standards have an incredible amount of overlap. As someone who's blind I don't want to interact with my online banking website through AI because they were to lazy to insure it's accessible and would rather click a checkbox. I already deal with enough hallucinations about functions in third party libraries that don't exist, inaccurate product specifications, etc. I don't want to miss a bill payment because AI thought it knew what I wanted and sent money to the wrong place, or misread my account. I could see a place for AI conducting basic automated testing for accessibility and providing information to a human to verify but I'm not sure if such a product exists.

It is not easy to get everything right in terms of accessibility. You make a very good point about certain content, such as your bank account, being too sensitive for the browser to actively interpret. Thanks!

You might be on to something here. Desktop agents that can have a fluid conversation with e.g. blind people about what they're "seeing". I'm not sure you need a special browser, though. Just wait a year!

Meta AI and Be MY Eyes already can do something similar with cameras. It's useful to me as a blind person but definitely not to the point where I'd trust it to help me do online banking, apply for jobs etc. I frequently get incorrect information such as invalid expiration dates on food, inability to read temperatures on displays in sunlight, telling me products are on the shelf in the pantry that aren't, etc. My wife loves the blindness specific AI image recognition though since it's really good at determining the flavor of Propel water and I no longer have to ask her if it's grape or not.

Multiply those numbers by x1000 times and that's more like it.

It's actually the other way around, the accessible web site can be easily automated by AI.

If it would cost only $15m, why wouldn’t Microsoft develop it and add it to Azure’s CDN as a tickbox feature?

$15 million is 35+ people working full time for a year at $200/hr each (75,000 hours). I am not an expert, but I bet this could get the job done.

My question stands: if it’s that cheap to build, why wouldn’t a big tech company build it? Or a startup? Why does a government need to get involved?

I don't think it's likely to be a profitable endeavor, but it's important and for the public good, so a fine way to spend some public $$

Turning it into an unfunded legal or regulatory mandate for browser companies doesn't seem fair either.

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