Articles
Original articles on digital accessibility, research, and practice.
2 results found tagged machine learning.
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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.