How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps

Tepix 10 hours ago|

While the content was interesting, the AI-slop-stench was repelling.

Talking about AI (sorry!), perhaps an AI assisted screen reader could remove repetitive elements (it appends "(read only)" to every. single. field.) in a smart fashion? Does this already exist?

We're seeing AI being used to improve a11y in quite a few places: (Live) transcripts for video conferences, image to text (VQA, visual question answering) etc.

zersiax 4 hours ago|

No. There are certainly AI-generated accessibility solutions for single, existing applications, games and websites but no outright AI-powered screen reader. I'd think the token cost alone would make such a project prohibitively expensive, although one-off AI features are starting to sneak into JAWS and NVDA as we spaek, so who knows.

fc417fc802 2 hours ago||

It's not as though the task requires a frontier size LLM. A small on device model should suffice for most clean up.

But if you did want to run a full size model deepseek v4 flash is so cheap that I doubt even many hours of web browsing would have a noticeable cost.

monster_group 8 hours ago||

Note the irony in the title.

edu 11 hours ago||

> It took 18 hours of work.

So a couple of days plus a few hours. Seems reasonable.

harvey9 8 hours ago|

Originally expected to take 2 hours. I think the writer is just saying it was a lot more than expected.

neverartful 2 hours ago||

[flagged]

mamcx 6 hours ago|

In general you WANNA see any people using your app.

Read an "accessibility" spec or a requirement or a UX "good practice" is not a substitute for see how people use it!

One of my anecdotes from back in the day: The secretary of a school that use the app I help develop call about problems reading data, that comes in CD. We can't do much by phone so I travel to the town to try to debug on site (bring dev tools in the day where that means diskettes and cds, we were transitioning from FoxPro 2.6 DOS to Visual Fox Windows 95).

Eventually after some time the secretary put the coffee cup in the CD tray.

Go figure!