"There are genuine opportunities to align the interests of AI and accessibility, but that alignment cannot be taken for ...

"There are genuine opportunities to align the interests of AI and accessibility, but that alignment cannot be taken for granted. Plaintext documentation optimized for a language model is not the same as well-structured HTML for a screen reader. If the benefit for accessibility is assumed rather than intentionally designed, the result may be superficial or illusory.However, the public must not accept that incidental accessibility benefits arising from AI development are an unqualified good. Not only is this assumption flawed, but it accepts a hierarchy that disability advocates should be challenging. The implicit premise is that disabled people’s needs require a commercial co-signer before they merit action. When a society is unmoved by decades of advocacy from disabled communities but springs into action when a tech company needs the same accommodation, it reveals whose claims on shared resources are treated as legitimate and whose are treated as optional.And as AI companies begin to f...