Blind internet users struggle with error-prone AI aids

https://www.ft.com/content/3c877c55-b698-43da-a222-8ae183f53078

by YeGoblynQueenne • 2 years ago

65 23 2 years ago

ft.com

romellem• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/sU37m

webspinner7• 2 years ago

Cool thanks for all the archive links yay!

azemetre• 2 years ago

The club had “no idea” the software, set up with no manual intervention, was that unreliable, Rosin said.

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

pvillano• 2 years ago

It's maddening that they didn't check if it worked. It's like they don't care...

CatWChainsaw• 2 years ago

Well, it's likely that they don't.

webspinner7• 2 years ago

It's a thing I run into with a decent amount developers these days, actually. I tried to work with a particular service to get them to fix their accessibility for months, and all I got was well, we fixed the tabbed navigation a bit. Which would probably be cool, if this wasn't a webapp that I was trying to use with all my various quick nav things, etc.

gnicholas• 2 years ago

Level Access, an accessibility provider, has just bought UserWay, an overlay maker.

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...

webspinner7• 2 years ago

Oh I also don't deal with overlays. I have an extension installed to block all of them.

webspinner7• 2 years ago

When I say I don't deal with overlays, and I refuse, I think they're a scourge. They want to help businesses by not getting sued, but they don't want to help us, the community, in any way. Audio eye threatened to sue someone who was in the process of exposing them, for defamation. https://adrianroselli.com/2023/02/audioeye-will-get-you-sued...

userbinator• 2 years ago

Error-prone AI has been a horrible nuisance even for those who aren't blind.

gerdesj2• 2 years ago

The rise in AI generated content affects us all, generally negatively, sighted or not.

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.

skydhash2• 2 years ago

I don't know how worse it will get, but my current solution is a hoard of pdfs (books and articles), saving links (in case I can't find that one good site), and a documentation browser (Dash on macOS). A current trend is curated lists of links (awesome lists, blogrolls,…) so maybe one day, the only good way to experience the web will be this small web which will act like a human filter.

rand0mx1• 2 years ago

Do you hoard web pages using extension like SingleFile Web?

idle_zealot• 2 years ago

I've already personally encountered a website in search results that when visited shows just a headline/title that is suspiciously spot-on to your search parameters, then a bunch of content-loading placeholders with ads interspersed. After a few seconds the placeholders start filling in, one section at a time, with what is clearly AI-generated filler text related to the title topic.

mintplant• 2 years ago

https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2F...

xk_id• 2 years ago

“AI aids” is a wonderful accident of language.

soygem• 2 years ago

Who knew you could get aids from AI...

devinprater• 2 years ago

Can confirm. But it's barely AI. Definitely not generative. Articles just love to put AI on everything. Then again, so do these accessibility grifters that plop the label onto anything that's barely automated.

webspinner7• 2 years ago

It isn't something I struggle with, because it isn't something I choose to deal with at the moment.

webspinner7• 2 years ago

This article is behind a paywall, I unpaywalled it for everyone. https://archive.ph/kED3D

Blind internet users struggle with error-prone AI aids

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