Values

Normally, I reserve these more introspective texts for my newsletter, which I send out occasionally. But this time, I want to make sure I document this particular struggle on my website, too.

This is a difficult text to write and as I start, I realize that I don’t know where this is going, so please excuse me if it is even more meandering than usual.

Let’s talk about the disconnect within the accessibility scene/industry/community¹ and about the stampede of elephants in the room. Last week, Deque used their free axe-con marketing event² to announce the vision of getting to 100% automated accessibility (by volume) across all disciplines within the next 10 years. This would be possible with “AI”.

The backlash during the keynote was swift and forceful. I’m not sure how this was not anticipated. Axe-con is still a conference considered part of the accessibility community, so the message to replace genuine human testing and evaluation with “AI” could never land with that audience. But it also wasn’t made for that audience³ .

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I'm a web accessibility professional who cares deeply about inclusion and an open web for everyone. I work with Axess Lab as an accessibility specialist. Previously, I worked with Knowbility, the World Wide Web Consortium, and Aktion Mensch. In this blog I publish my own thoughts and research about the web industry.

I don’t want to replicate the slide, but there is a slide that shows 2024 as 57% of automation, and 2025 as 100% automation, despite saying later that that’s somehow a 10-year vision. The presenter also says to get to 100% “or as close so it doesn’t really matter”, and that is an interesting phrase.

Because accessibility happens in these margins. “These few users and use cases don’t matter” is something I still hear occasionally. Recently, a fairly large online shop has introduced screen reader detection in their app to see if screen reader users are actually using their app – which is not very screen reader friendly. These tactics are used to reduce the need to make technology accessible.

The reality is: These percentages, hundredths of percentages, that is what web accessibility people should care about. This is where it matters. Promising 100% coverage or close to it, siphoning funds off real accessibility changes, will lock out people quickly.

And then there is the other side of the coin of being a consultant for accessibility. It’s not (just) about crossing t’s and dotting i’s to ensure conformance, it is about teaching designers, developers, project managers, and beyond the importance of accessibility and how to use it to make more inclusive and less ableist decisions that lead to better outcomes.

We know that “AI” impacts critical thinking negatively. This is an inherent threat to accessibility in particular but also to human society eventually. Mindlessly copying and paste corrections from an “AI” might make you feel more productive, but what starts as automation in one section (for testers in the case of accessibility testing aided with “AI”) becomes worse productivity somewhere else. For example, designers that don’t understand how to create accessible color pallets need to re-do them over and over again because “AI says no”, but they might not understand why. The same goes for programmers who will correct their code and never learn to do it correctly. If the “AI” is broken, or the problem is new, they don’t know how to deal with it. And sometimes the “AI” might just generate nonsense⁴ and the critical thinking of determining if it is right or wrong is absent.

I think the misstep in tone in any presentation, especially with “AI”, is to not acknowledge the threats that concern disabled people and the community that supports them. Dismantling the state apparatus in the US that has historically ensured that disabled people get their rights, the thread of war, massive cuts to health care, the attempts to treat disabled people as second-class people.

Not acknowledging these changes and then framing the European Accessibility Act (EAA) as an excellent business opportunity that will need more people to work on accessibility just shows how far apart the values of some accessibility companies are in comparison to the people they work with. Also, I’ve seen a fair share of people on LinkedIn who have moved on from Deque over the last year, maybe the need for “AI” would be lessened if those employees were kept?

As you might have noticed, I don’t mention the names of the presenters of the Deque session because while I think they believe what they say, their objectives, their values are company objectives and values. As a company, it is a straightforward thought to say “clients/stakeholders/investors want to hear about AI, let’s talk about AI”.

But in accessibility that does not work. I, personally, believe that it works nowhere. And even if “AI” was working and universally fixing ableist outcomes of human processes to be technically accessible, my values tell me that we only put icing on an ableist mud cake.

It might quack like a cake, walk like a cake, and look like a cake, but it’s still muddy underneath it. It also would make accessibility something with a price tag, something that can be saved if politics is not defending accessibility – like what happens in the US right now. A developer who has learned to produce good, accessible code will write it whether it is mandated or not. When you switch off an “AI Agent”, you’re left with nothing permanent and/or a decrease in accessibility in the future.

There is no magic wand to make accessibility happen, other than hiring disabled people and include them in every step, in every decision. You want “100% AI accessibility”, try the Accessibility Intelligence of actual disabled people.

There are use cases where “AI” tools can actually be helpful. In real-world situations where there is no description available, a picture description can help with orientation or finding things. When there is no alternative text provided, users can use it themselves to identify the photo. Then at least they are aware of possible mistakes. Providing transcripts in situations where there is no time or budget to have them done professionally⁵ can be a stopgap.

My values are people-based, are community-based, are society-based. I think when we learn from each other’s experiences, we will grow as humanity, and we will grow our humanity. I know that it doesn’t look like this at the moment, but no societal growth spurt happens without backlash or setbacks.

Accessibility is difficult, working in an ableist society is difficult. Realizing that ableism runs wide in the accessibility community hurts⁶ . This is a chance to think about our own values and how we apply them to our jobs. For me, supporting people to experience all their human rights equally is a fundamental value. Not only that, but I think inaccessibility violates people’s dignity.

I, and probably everyone in the accessibility industry, could be in a better paying, less stressful, less occasionally antagonistic role with our skill set. Really good accessibility professionals (and yes, I butter my own bread here – deal with it) have skills that translate into all different situations because that’s what you need to be good at your job. You need to be a designer, a developer, a manager, a teacher, a decider, a reader of specifications, a shoulder to lean on, a resilient punching bag at times. Accessibility is a holistic discipline, so to be a specialist here, you also have to be a generalist in most other disciplines and a specialist in some.

It’s a tough gig, and we’re squeezed between our own goals and the compromises we have to agree to daily.

The reality is that most of us have so high values that we are bound to fail in an ableist society. “AI” won’t change that. What it will do, similarly to Overlays, is that it devalues accessibility work by decoupling it from the actual humans needed to do the work and from the actual humans who need the work to be done. (Especially in accessibility, there’s significant overlap between those groups.) We accept that the platonic ideal of accessibility is unreachable in this ableist society, but it doesn’t stop us to push the Overton window into a more accessible place. That acceptance is mostly self-protection and self-preservation. Without it, we would have a binary choice of giving up or pushing for perfection, but that’s just not how the world works. I know that this difference between what we want to do and what we can do is a huge burden, especially for people who are new to this, and there are few support structures in place to help to deal with this stress.

Telling people that accessibility “so close to 100% in a way that it doesn’t matter” is possible with “AI” is a gut punch. It undermines the expertise and the versatility of the profession. It makes accessibility a technological problem, but it is a human problem.

How do we know? “Accessibility will be solved by technology in 10 years” is progressing in the same rate as is “AI” in general and fusion power. It’s always around the corner. And then it never is.

What this causes is deferral and loss of knowledge. We already have a significant gap between juniors and seniors and no clear paths how people can train up to be better equipped with testing and fixing accessibility. That’s the challenge we already have and by declaring accessibility a “100%” solved problem, we’re losing the interest from new juniors in the field and devalue the knowledge of us who do this for a long time.

Do I think that I, someone who does this for over 15 years of in-depth experience, should not do the chores of writing up simple alternative text issues? Sure! But I also know that this is a great way to get started for people new to it and then step-by-step broaden their experience. In addition, what I write up for clients does not matter that much, but how I write it up, how I inspire them, how I engage them to address issues. Communicate where the main blockers for disabled people are, and ensuring that they don’t focus on small issues that are not that important in context.

The reality is that my values, my goals for my job are different from those of big accessibility companies. For a company, dependence is important. That creates long-lasting clients, and that brings in the money. While I want and need to pay my bills, earning money is not my goal because there will always be enough work for me. I look forward to – and fondly back on – every instance where clients told me that they now have accessibility under control. Just this year, a long-term client project halved their hours with me, not because the coaching wasn’t useful, but because they have now more knowledge and understanding and don’t need to rely on me as much. This is wonderful.

Overall, it’s totally fine to have different values and different goals. The disconnect exists when you try to convince me that your values are also my values. They are not.

Some interesting axe-con talks

Here are some axe-con talks that caught my eyes and that you should check out⁷ . I did not watch any of them before I wrote above because I could not make time for it yet.

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Oh, more disconnects! ↩
There are genuinely great talks featured, and it is a great resource to the community, but the company wouldn’t do it if they would not expect publicity from it – which is a fair deal. ↩
Sorry, but if your script says, “Your work isn’t just following the AI revolution, it is enabling it.” that’s just another way of saying “We will take your work and productize it and sell it.” ↩
“hallucination” ↩
Apparently Deque thinks automated live transcriptions are good enough for an accessibility conference, and I vehemently disagree. The transcripts are barely understandable. They also sometimes transcribe “Deque” as “TC”. The captions appear to be much better. ↩
Explicit props to Deque for making this a COVID/Influenza competent experience by holding it online. I also think this conference is much more accessible cognitively because you can watch the videos on your own time and from the comfort of your own home. Most conferences, accessibility or otherwise, have given up these crucial aspects of accessibility ↩
You can make your own decision on what the choices say about my current state 😬 ↩

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