Accessibility as an Opportunity and Challenge for Intelligent User Interfaces

The World Health Organization estimates that over one billion people worldwide are disabled. Innovations at the intersection of AI and HCI have the potential to increase the accessibility of the digital and physical worlds for people experiencing long-term, temporary, and/or situational disabilities. Considering accessibility scenarios can illuminate opportunities and challenges for designers of intelligent user interfaces. In this keynote, I will use two scenarios to illustrate this concept: automatic alt text generation for images and augmentative and alternative communication technologies.

Alternative text (“alt text”) descriptions can be read aloud by screen reader software to increase image accessibility to people who are blind or have low vision. Many content authors fail to provide alt text metadata, leaving billions of digital images inaccessible to screen reader users. Advances in vision-to-language technologies offer promise for scaling the accessibility of digital imagery, but also present challenges such as user-understandable error metrics and the selection of relevant details.

Augmentative and alternative communication (“AAC”) technologies facilitate communication for people with speech disabilities. Many users with extremely limited mobility rely on eye gaze input to control AAC, typically resulting in limited communication bandwidth of 10 – 20 words per minute (compared with nearly 200 words per minute for spoken English). Advances in predictive language technologies have the potential to enhance the speed and expressivity of AAC communications, but present challenges around preserving user autonomy and authenticity.

For both scenarios (automatic alt text and predictive AAC), I will share research on end-user preferences that can inform technology design, as well as presenting novel prototypes that combine human and machine intelligence to support these user needs. I will close by identifying opportunities for future work at the intersection of intelligent user interfaces and accessibility.