> Now that AI is a thing now, I doubt OCR and even self-driving cars will get any significant advancements.
Great to read that blind folks get so much benefit from LLMs. But this one quote seemed odd. The most amazing OCR and document attribution products are becoming available due to LLMs
The headline is clearly meant to be sarcastic but the actual body of the text seems to indicate that AI back in 2023 was going pretty great for the blind - it mostly reports on others who are enthusiastic adopters of it, despite the author's own misgivings.
Thats''s one very angry take on things. As a blind person myself, AI is a net benefit, it has potential, but I also agree that there are lots of people who think that if AI solutions are good enough, there is no need to invest in actually accessible gui-s. The last one is an extremely wrong take, because ai-s always will be the slowest solution which might be badly prompted or just hallucinate. Just today someone was complaining that Gemini's code editor is not fully accessible and was looking for advice there, so I'd give the author points for mentioning that the very ai interface might be unaccessible. Not to mention that often chat web interfaces lack proper aria descriptions for some basic operations.
The IETF AI-Preference standard group is currently discussing whether or not to include an example of bypassing AI preferences to support assistive technologies. Oddly enough, many publishers oppose that.
> With an LLM, it will never get annoyed, aggravated, think less of the person, or similar.
Between people, it's extremely commonly considered impolite to request excess help from other people. -- So, having an info retrieval / interactive chat which will patiently answer questions is a boon for everyone.
I guess you can try and frame all 'helping' as "you're +1 if you're being helpful", but don't be surprised if not everyone sees things that way all the time.
> The blind and visually impaired people advocating for this have been conditioned to believe that technology will solve all accessibility problems because, simply put, humans won’t do it.
Technology is not just sprouting out of the ground out of its own. It is humans who are making it. Therefore if technology is helpful it was humans who helped.
> Let’s not mention the fact the particular large language model, LLM called Chat GPT they chose, was never the right kind of machine learning for the task of describing images.
Weird. I would think LLMs are exactly the right kind of tool to describe images. Sadly there is no more detail about what they think would be a better approach.
> I fully predict that blind people will be advocating to make actual LLM platforms accessible
Absolutely. The LLM platforms indeed very much should be accessible. I don't think anyone would have beef with that.
> I also predict web accessibility will actually get worse, not better, as coding models will spit out inaccessible code that developers won’t check or won’t even care to check.
Who knows. Either that, or some pages will become more accessible because the effort of making it accessible will be less on the part of the devs. It probably will be a mixed bag with a little bit of column A and column B.
> Now that AI is a thing now, I doubt OCR and even self-driving cars will get any significant advancements.
These are all AI. They are all improving leaps and bounds.
> An LLM will always be there, well, until the servers go down
Of course. That is a concern. This is why models you can run yourself are so important. Local models are good for latency and reliability. But even if the model is run on a remote server as long as you control the server you can decide when it becomes shut down.
My mom is 100% blind, everything I build I make sure my mom can use it. I remediated visa checkout to save a tier 1 bank contract and got them to WCAG2.0 compatibility. With my “credentials” out do the way…
Ugh, this is what sort of bothers me about the accessibility community. Something about it is always coming off preachy and like a moral argument. This is the worst way to get folks to actually care. You’re just making them feel bad.
Look the fact is everyone needs to use technology to live these days. And us devs suck ass at making those things accessible. Even in the slightest. It won’t be until we all age into needing it when it finally becomes a real issue that’s tackled. Until then, tools like LLMs are going to be amazingly helpful. Posts like this are missing the forest in the trees.
My mom has been using ChatGPT for a ton of things that’s helpful. It’s a massive net positive. The LLM alt tags Facebook added a long time ago, massively helpful. Perfect? Hell no. But we gotta stop acting like these improvements aren’t helpful and aren’t progress. It comes across as whiny. I say this as someone who is in this community.
I use AI, as a blind person. I posted a week or so ago a video in which I use TalkBack's image description feature to play a video game that has no accessibility at all. Of course, that was on Android which isn't the most blind-friendly of OS', and iOS doesn't have LLM image descriptions built in, nor good PS2 emulators.
Other blind people are all in with the AI hype, describing themselves as partially sighted because of AI with their Meta Rayban glasses. Sidenote, Rayban glasses report that I died last year. I somehow missed my funeral, sorry to all those who were there without me. I do like brains, though...
Meanwhile many LLM sites are not blind-friendly, like Claude, Perplexity, and there are sites that try but fail so exasperatingly hard that I lose any motivation for filing reports where I can't even begin to explain what's breaking so hard. It's evident that OpenWebUI have not tested their accessibility with a screen reader. Anyway blindness organizations (NFB mainly) have standardized on just use ChatGPT and everything else is the wild west where they absolutely do not care. Gemini could be more accessible, on web and especially Android, but all reports have been ignored so I'm not going to bother with them anymore. It's sad since their AI describes images well. Thank goodness for the API, and tools like [PiccyBot](https://www.piccybot.com/) on iOS/Android and [viewpoint](https://viewpoint.nibblenerds.com/) and [OmniDescriber](https://audioses.com/en/yazilimlar.php) on Windows. I'm still waiting for iOS to catch up to Android in LLM image descriptions built into the screen reader. Meanwhile, at least we have [this shortcut](https://shortcutjar.com/describe/documentation/). It uses GPT 4O but at least it's something. Apple could easily integrate with their own Apple Intelligence to call out to ChatGPT or whatever, but I guess competition has to happen. Or something. Maybe next year lol. In the meantime I'll either use my own cents to get descriptions or share to Seeing AI or something like a cave man.
When my employer jumped on the bandwagon and built it's own internal wrapper around ChatGPT, I've tested it with a screen reader using keyboard navigation. And it was terrible. As long as humans don't really care about the disabled (which they really don't), I doubt the AI will solve the problems of visually impaired people.
13 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 32.1 ms ] threadGreat to read that blind folks get so much benefit from LLMs. But this one quote seemed odd. The most amazing OCR and document attribution products are becoming available due to LLMs
I recall speaking to a girl who thanked these voice assistants for helping her order food and cook.
Right now I'm using AI while traveling, it gets stuff 85% right which is enough for lunch.
Between people, it's extremely commonly considered impolite to request excess help from other people. -- So, having an info retrieval / interactive chat which will patiently answer questions is a boon for everyone.
I guess you can try and frame all 'helping' as "you're +1 if you're being helpful", but don't be surprised if not everyone sees things that way all the time.
Technology is not just sprouting out of the ground out of its own. It is humans who are making it. Therefore if technology is helpful it was humans who helped.
> Let’s not mention the fact the particular large language model, LLM called Chat GPT they chose, was never the right kind of machine learning for the task of describing images.
Weird. I would think LLMs are exactly the right kind of tool to describe images. Sadly there is no more detail about what they think would be a better approach.
> I fully predict that blind people will be advocating to make actual LLM platforms accessible
Absolutely. The LLM platforms indeed very much should be accessible. I don't think anyone would have beef with that.
> I also predict web accessibility will actually get worse, not better, as coding models will spit out inaccessible code that developers won’t check or won’t even care to check.
Who knows. Either that, or some pages will become more accessible because the effort of making it accessible will be less on the part of the devs. It probably will be a mixed bag with a little bit of column A and column B.
> Now that AI is a thing now, I doubt OCR and even self-driving cars will get any significant advancements.
These are all AI. They are all improving leaps and bounds.
> An LLM will always be there, well, until the servers go down
Of course. That is a concern. This is why models you can run yourself are so important. Local models are good for latency and reliability. But even if the model is run on a remote server as long as you control the server you can decide when it becomes shut down.
I help people with very mundane and human tasks: cooking, gardening, label identification.
*https://www.bemyeyes.com/download-app/
Ugh, this is what sort of bothers me about the accessibility community. Something about it is always coming off preachy and like a moral argument. This is the worst way to get folks to actually care. You’re just making them feel bad.
Look the fact is everyone needs to use technology to live these days. And us devs suck ass at making those things accessible. Even in the slightest. It won’t be until we all age into needing it when it finally becomes a real issue that’s tackled. Until then, tools like LLMs are going to be amazingly helpful. Posts like this are missing the forest in the trees.
My mom has been using ChatGPT for a ton of things that’s helpful. It’s a massive net positive. The LLM alt tags Facebook added a long time ago, massively helpful. Perfect? Hell no. But we gotta stop acting like these improvements aren’t helpful and aren’t progress. It comes across as whiny. I say this as someone who is in this community.
Other blind people are all in with the AI hype, describing themselves as partially sighted because of AI with their Meta Rayban glasses. Sidenote, Rayban glasses report that I died last year. I somehow missed my funeral, sorry to all those who were there without me. I do like brains, though...
Meanwhile many LLM sites are not blind-friendly, like Claude, Perplexity, and there are sites that try but fail so exasperatingly hard that I lose any motivation for filing reports where I can't even begin to explain what's breaking so hard. It's evident that OpenWebUI have not tested their accessibility with a screen reader. Anyway blindness organizations (NFB mainly) have standardized on just use ChatGPT and everything else is the wild west where they absolutely do not care. Gemini could be more accessible, on web and especially Android, but all reports have been ignored so I'm not going to bother with them anymore. It's sad since their AI describes images well. Thank goodness for the API, and tools like [PiccyBot](https://www.piccybot.com/) on iOS/Android and [viewpoint](https://viewpoint.nibblenerds.com/) and [OmniDescriber](https://audioses.com/en/yazilimlar.php) on Windows. I'm still waiting for iOS to catch up to Android in LLM image descriptions built into the screen reader. Meanwhile, at least we have [this shortcut](https://shortcutjar.com/describe/documentation/). It uses GPT 4O but at least it's something. Apple could easily integrate with their own Apple Intelligence to call out to ChatGPT or whatever, but I guess competition has to happen. Or something. Maybe next year lol. In the meantime I'll either use my own cents to get descriptions or share to Seeing AI or something like a cave man.