"Accessibility people, you go work on that thing of yours over there": Addressing Disability Inclusion in AI Product Organizations
This work addresses the problem of disability inclusion in AI products for practitioners and disabled end users, but it is incremental as it identifies issues without proposing major new solutions.
The study interviewed 25 AI practitioners to understand how AI product development impacts users with disabilities, finding friction in integrating accessibility with responsible AI practices and gaps in data about disabled users.
The rapid emergence of generative AI has changed the way that technology is designed, constructed, maintained, and evaluated. Decisions made when creating AI-powered systems may impact some users disproportionately, such as people with disabilities. In this paper, we report on an interview study with 25 AI practitioners across multiple roles (engineering, research, UX, and responsible AI) about how their work processes and artifacts may impact end users with disabilities. We found that practitioners experienced friction when triaging problems at the intersection of responsible AI and accessibility practices, navigated contradictions between accessibility and responsible AI guidelines, identified gaps in data about users with disabilities, and gathered support for addressing the needs of disabled stakeholders by leveraging informal volunteer and community groups within their company. Based on these findings, we offer suggestions for new resources and process changes to better support people with disabilities as end users of AI.