AI and Accessibility: A Discussion of Ethical Considerations
It addresses ethical considerations in AI for accessibility, which is crucial for inclusive technology development, but is primarily a discussion paper without new technical contributions.
The paper discusses how AI technologies can remove accessibility barriers for over one billion people with disabilities, such as using computer vision for the blind or speech recognition for the hard of hearing, while highlighting ethical challenges like bias and privacy.
According to the World Health Organization, more than one billion people worldwide have disabilities. The field of disability studies defines disability through a social lens; people are disabled to the extent that society creates accessibility barriers. AI technologies offer the possibility of removing many accessibility barriers; for example, computer vision might help people who are blind better sense the visual world, speech recognition and translation technologies might offer real time captioning for people who are hard of hearing, and new robotic systems might augment the capabilities of people with limited mobility. Considering the needs of users with disabilities can help technologists identify high-impact challenges whose solutions can advance the state of AI for all users; however, ethical challenges such as inclusivity, bias, privacy, error, expectation setting, simulated data, and social acceptability must be considered.