Articles
Original articles on digital accessibility, research, and practice.
3 results found tagged AI ethics.
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Sign Language and Technology: Advances, Tensions, and the Question of Who Benefits
Research on sign language accessibility reveals a field where impressive technical progress coexists with fundamental questions about privacy, community authority, and whether the technology serves deaf people or merely studies them. This article examines 74 papers spanning recognition and translation, the 93% privacy concern rate for sign language data, the disconnect between ML practitioners and the Deaf community, avatar resistance, information access, learning technology, and the persistent one-directional translation bias.
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Machine Learning and Digital Accessibility: What Works, What Fails, and What Gets Lost in Between
AI is simultaneously the most promising tool and the most documented source of harm in recent accessibility research. This article examines approximately 235 papers revealing where machine learning helps — captioning accuracy improved by 5.6%, web navigation 52% faster, audio description production halved — and where it fails: fabricating image descriptions, reproducing ableist stereotypes in career chatbots, homogenising personalised AAC tools, and systematically excluding anyone whose body or speech falls outside training data norms.
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AI Safety and Disability: What Accessibility Research Reveals About Hallucination, Bias, Privacy, and the Protocols That Do and Don't Exist
Disabled people depend on AI systems they cannot verify, trust AI outputs that fabricate content, and share intimate data with platforms that offer no disability-specific protections. This article examines approximately 135 papers documenting 79 AI harm incidents, the 4.9x improvement in unreliable claim detection when AI uncertainty is surfaced, zero disability-specific privacy protections across 18 AT policies, sycophantic AI behaviour, age stereotyping, career chatbot fabrication, and the protocols that do and do not exist to protect disabled users.