Comment by MrVandemar
11 hours ago
> 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.
The companies who think AI means they get to reduce headcount will be eaten.
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.