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Comment by stillpointlab | Hacker News Reader

I believe AI can be huge here. Things like ADA are often mechanical (adding the correct attributes to the most important page elements). It is the perfect work to audit and fix using agents.

It is a business opportunity as well. I worked at a company that paid for an audit before LLMs. There is tremendous cost savings possible here.

I also wonder if WebMCP will be the ultimate final incarnation of this.

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> It is a business opportunity as well. I worked at a company that paid for an audit before LLMs. There is tremendous cost savings possible here.

Do you know one of the most underemployed groups are disabled people? And do you know where a number of disabled people get employment? Disability audits (unsurprisingly they're extremely good at this).

Congratulations on recommending further marginalising an extremely marginalised group.

I suppose it is a question of balance between: the entire web being better for all those that require accessibility vs. a subsection of that community holding their jobs. And it raises the possibility that the increased accessibility could lead to more job opportunities.

But I'm not really a consequentialist and think of things in virtue ethics terms. And using technology to scale benefits to a wider group of people doesn't conflict for me. YMMV.

It's not "virtue ethics". It's a fact: turning accessibility testing over to "AI" will deprive a group of low-income low-agency people with skin in the game of employment.

If society were perhaps more compassionate, and supportive of this group, then perhaps it wouldn't be so much of a problem.

As to your point about significantly improving accessibility of the web, we could do that right now, all of us, without "AI". We could have done that yesterday. Use semantic HTML, instead of injecting div-soup using Javascript into ad-riddled dark-patterned user hostile slop-pages.

"AI" (or accessibility audits themselves) are a bandaid after the fact. Accessibility needs to be baked in.

Wait what? We should withhold accessibility features to not marginalize disabled people?

No, we should not withhold accessibility features. I wrote nothing to suggest that we should.

I wrote that a group of marginalised people would be further marginalised, and deprived of income and meaningful work in a sector where they are, by circumstance, subject matter experts. Anything else is projection.

>No, we should not withhold accessibility features.

So if AI finds and fixes the accessibility deficiencies thats good for disabled people right? Not marginalizing.

The point is that there are unintended consequences, a real cost to people who are already struggling. The broader disability community is already noticing, rather sourly, that accessibility for "AI" is suddenly a prime concern, where they have been struggling for decades to get any attention or consideration for their own needs.

What is better for everyone is if the people building the systems start with considering accessibility beforehand instead of shipping something broken then fixing it.

The companies who think AI means they get to reduce headcount will be eaten.

Using AI to close gaps in accessibility is like adding treads to your vehicle because society is too lazy to pave roads.

I think they were suggesting using AI to audit for accessibility, which is probably a better approach, and probably more effective than a lot of the basic accessibility checkers out there that work on a list of fairly simple rules and don't understand the context of what they're doing, so tend to give either very limited advice, or sometimes even offer bad advice.

Research and fallbacks would certainly be better. An 85% design, 15% algorithmic solution is probably the sweet "pobody's nerfect" spot, but a company using AI to solve accessibility is like selling rape whistles -- in a perfect world, your market is nonexistent.

I think people outside of enterprise have no idea the cost to audit and fix a massive website.

The law is a forcing function here. Lawsuits can and do happen when sites of a certain size fail to implement government-mandated laws. This is a good thing, IMO, but it only comes into force in the largest cases.

If there is a credible path to 1/10th the cost (while still providing liability insurance which is a critical piece) then that will likely encourage more enterprise to do it proactively, and will open the door for startups and mid-sized companies.

I have no idea why anyone would choose to see this as bad.

I'm not outside of enterprise and have worked hands-on for over a decade with AI-driven customer workflows. The cost of accessibility audits are NOT higher than AI R&D or third-party B2B contracts for vaporware touting to do the same.

Sorry if that assertion stands opposed to your value prop.

The state of affairs in the last 6 months bears almost no resemblance to the state of affairs in the last decade.

No need to apologize, neither of us can predict the future. I am optimistic Fable-level models can succeed where the old not-actually-AI models failed. No shame in being pessimistic about the same.

Well isn’t it like asking the AI to pave roads?

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