Designing With Us, Not For Us: AI, Accessibility and Who Gets to Create

12 hours ago

5 min read

AI is changing how people with disability find, read and create digital content. Some of the new tools are impressive. But the most important shift isn't any single feature. It's whether people with disability get a say in what is created, and how.

Here are five developments worth knowing about, and where Australia stands. For more background, see our earlier posts Watch: Agents of Inclusion – Accessibility in the Age of AI, Pathways to Opportunity: AI, Accessibility and the Creative Economy and Beyond Mobo: Where Companion Robots Are Heading.

1. People with disability are being brought into media and content design

UNESCO's practical manual, Disability Equality in the Media: Representation, Accessibility, Management, gives media organisations hands-on advice in three areas: fair and accurate coverage of disability, making content and services accessible, and building inclusive workplaces. UNESCO's work also encourages media organisations to collaborate with organisations of people with disability.

That is a subtle but important change. The question moves from 'How do we make our existing content accessible?' to 'How do people with disability take part in deciding what gets made, and how?'

2. AI is opening up complex content

In May 2026, Apple announced a set of upcoming accessibility features. They include richer AI-generated descriptions of images and documents in VoiceOver, Voice Control that understands everyday language (such as 'tap the purple folder'), and an Accessibility Reader that can handle scientific papers, multi-column layouts and tables, with summaries and translation. Apple also announced on-device subtitles for videos that have no captions.

Features like these move accessibility beyond simply getting into a document, towards understanding and working with complex content. As a Forbes analysis of the announcement points out, technology alone won't close the disability employment gap. Employers also need accessible workplaces and fair hiring practices.

3. Deaf technologists are raising a different issue: privacy

Sam Sepah, a Deaf AI researcher at Google, argues that disabled people are often asked to give up privacy in exchange for access. Camera-based sign language tools have usually needed to record people's faces and surroundings. Sepah and his colleagues built a sign-language-to-text AI that tracks only the coordinates of body movements, so it doesn't need to process facial data.

He also argues that Deaf people should be involved from the earliest stages of design, not brought in only for final testing. Accessibility shouldn't require disabled people to hand over more personal or biometric information than anyone else.

4. AI could change who gets to create software

At GitHub Universe 2026, GitHub's head of accessibility, Ed Summers, discussed how AI coding tools could lower barriers for developers with disability. But GitHub's research with Fable, which interviewed people who use screen readers, magnification and speech recognition software, found that terminals and command-line tools lack shared accessibility conventions. A text-based interface is not automatically an accessible one.

The lesson: accessibility has to follow each person across the tools they use, rather than assuming one 'accessible mode' suits everyone.

5. Laws and standards are catching up

In the United States, a rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requires state and local government websites and apps to meet accessibility standards. After the Department of Justice extended the deadlines in April 2026, larger governments (populations of 50,000 or more) must comply by 26 April 2027, and smaller ones and special districts by 26 April 2028.

Policy is still lagging behind the technology, though. A review by Utah State University's National Center on Accessible Digital Educational Materials and Instruction, published in November 2026, found that only 12 US states have policies on the accessibility of digital learning materials in schools.

What about Australia?

The law: The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 applies to digital goods and services, not just physical spaces. In April 2025 the Australian Human Rights Commission published new Guidelines on equal access to digital goods and services. They recommend that organisations meet WCAG 2.2 at Level AA as a minimum, and they cover newer technologies such as AI, facial recognition and other biometrics.
Government services: The Australian Government's Digital Experience Policy, which includes a Digital Inclusion Standard, uses WCAG 2.2 as its accessibility benchmark.
Screen industry: Since July 2011, feature films funded by Screen Australia have had to be delivered with audio description as well as captions. In 2023 Screen Australia also launched an Access Coordinator Training Program to train people in this production role.
Creative tools: In its 2026 submission on the next National Cultural Policy, Blind Citizens Australia pointed to creative and digital tools, such as editing software and design platforms, that don't meet accessibility guidelines or work with screen readers. That is a barrier for people with disability who want to make content, not just watch it.

What this means for creatives with disability

Every one of these developments needs people with lived experience of disability behind it. Growing roles include:

Accessibility testers for websites, apps and creative software.
Audio describers and caption editors.
Auslan and sign language consultants.
Access coordinators on film and TV productions.
People who train, test and review AI systems.

To start building these skills, explore our free AI courses, and register your skills so we can match you with real projects.

The bigger picture

Taken together, these stories show a clear progression:

Making content accessible.
AI automatically adapting content.
Content personalised to each person's access needs.
People with disability helping to design the content, and the AI itself.

There is a tension in this. AI makes accessibility far easier to scale, but relying on AI alone risks designing for people with disability rather than designing with them. Disability Belongs makes a related point: AI tools can be a useful starting point for captions and image descriptions, but they need human review and clear accountability. Sam Sepah's call to involve Deaf people from the very start points the same way.

Have you been involved in designing the tools or content you use? Tell us about it.

Sources

Cover image: refreshable braille display, photo by Sebastien Delmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.