Holy Batman, is AI advancing quickly. That’s good.
But there are multiple digital accessibility companies who lie and make exaggerated claims about what AI is capable of. That’s bad.
The truth is artificial intelligence is already making digital accessibility much more efficient. It’s easy to make a mathematical case that thousands of hours and millions of dollars have already been saved.
But it’s not because AI automates accessibility audits or remediation, it’s because AI can save us a lot of manual work and gives us the ability to instantly tap into expertise.
Illustration 1:
Creating video subtitles is much easier now. Automated transcriptions are much more accurate and that means we don’t need to spend as much time reviewing.
Illustration 2:
A developer is working through an accessibility audit and now has the ability to ask a question on a fix he doesn’t understand. AI instantly provides expert advise.
Yes, AI can make some errors, but the results are still outstanding and overall extremely helpful.
But there’s no magic AI accessibility tool that takes a Shopify website and instantly makes it WCAG 2.1 AA conformant. Rather, what’s happening is that specific slices of accessibility are becoming much easier. The caution is that even with these aspects of accessibility AI can make quick work of, we still need to review to make sure everything is right, but that’s okay, because the benefits AI affords us are enormous.
Example: We’ve tested how AI performs with fixing code. Sometimes it makes an error and doesn’t provide the correct code or makes an oversight.
All of our audits are still 100% manual with only an automated scans used as a secondary review. This is not to say AI can’t help find accessibility issues, but it would actually slow our audit process down to use AI.
That said, there’s a lot of benefit AI can provide during the remediation process – especially when you consider most client teams are working through our audits and they don’t have accessibility expertise.
This is why we built 5 AI accessibility tools into our new Accessibility Tracker web app that enables clients to upload their audit spreadsheet and track progress as they resolve issues.
With these AI tools, clients get expertise and the ability to instantly produce code right within the dashboard for the accessibility issue they’re working on. This means clients need less technical support hours and can resolve issues faster on their own
This is the tremendous power of artificial intelligence: saving time and money through efficiency.
Some sellers will tell you accessibility can be automated. That’s a big red flag ruffling in the wind.
