Artificial intelligence products for disabled people

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionising the technology world. It can automate things only humans could do before, like recognising people in photos, understanding speech, and translating between languages.

Ableist artificial intelligence

But there are risks. AI often learns to do what it does by looking at lots of data. If the data it is trained with is biased, the AI will be biased too. If a speech-recognition AI is trained without any data from people with speech impairments, it won’t work for them. Disabled people already get a raw deal as consumers, and biased AI will make things worse.

Scope is encouraging people working in AI to use it to solve specific problems disabled people face, but also to make sure they don’t exclude disabled people from anything they make. This is part of Scope’s Big Hack program to make the digital world better for disabled people.

AI is already making a difference

Here are some examples of AI technology which are breaking down barriers specifically faced by disabled people:

• The Aipoly app for visually impaired people uses artificial intelligence (AI) to recognise thousands of everyday objects.
• Microsoft’s Seeing AI app reads out text from signs and documents, describes faces and more. They’re also working on a Hearing AI app that would translate sound into visual representations on screen.
• The National Theatre’s smart caption glasses display live captions for the wearer. They’ve meant a huge increase in the number of deaf and hard of hearing theatregoers.

Making your products more accessible

Creating an accessible product or service is not as scary as you think.

• Include disabled people in your user research. At Scope, we use a dedicated research panel of disabled people.
• When you’re training an AI, make sure your data includes disabled people, whether it’s photos, voices or other information.
• The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has standards and resources to help you create accessible websites.

Inclusive design is good design, it will make your product more usable for everyone. Companies who design for everyone are more successful commercially! The Big Hack has resources to help you make the business case for inclusivity.