If you haven’t read Eric Eggert’s post “Values“, I suggest you do so. The basics are that accessibility companies — Deque in particular — are pivoting toward AI because of course they are, everyone is pivoting toward AI.
But accessibility is not a thing that we can necessarily “solve” with AI, not just because AI just isn’t that smart yet, but also because AI does damage to teaching people how to avoid the issues in the first place.
What do we do when our values and the values of the companies we work with every day don’t align?
I’ll be honest, I don’t know either. (Well, I know what I do, but it’s a very personal decision, and not one that can be generalized. Oh hey, just like accessibility!)
Outside of accessibility (or overlapping it), we’re having the same struggles in UX Design. How do you convince stakeholders that whatever the AI generated isn’t going to be good enough because actual humans weren’t involved in the process? You don’t, you wait for them to fall on their faces, at least historically, but people still need to pay the bills.
Read Eric’s post, even if accessibility is only part of your job, because the as usual the problem may be hitting people with disabilities the hardest, but overall the issues are universal.