About
How We Think About AI
Our reason for being is to promote and enable the responsible use of AI in ways that help people. We are painfully aware that there are forces — many more and much better funded than we are — with less ideal goals and creating worse outcomes than that. That awareness doesn't discourage us. We see it as a call to educate and advocate, and that is exactly the work we get up each morning to do.
People First
It is concerning to see major companies rushing to replace workers with AI agents. Like many, we feel that society is undergoing more upheaval than advancement when this happens. But we are committed to ensuring that disabled workers have the same opportunity to benefit from AI as their employers: the removal of the friction and drudgery that create barriers to productive work.
Useful, Not Perfect
In the accessibility space, there are genuine opportunities to use AI to solve problems that would otherwise go unaddressed — testing that never happens, bugs that go undetected, barriers that go unfixed — because the scale of these jobs outstrips what any team of humans could undertake without intelligent automation. At the same time, we actively advocate for the involvement of disabled people throughout the development, design and testing of digital products; on both sides of the workbench, as consumers and creators. This isn't a contradiction, it is in our core philosophy to take exactly this holistic approach. This is based, in no small part, on the fact that it is provably the most effective way to build great products that actually work.
What We Know
AI can never replace the lived experience of disabled people, or substitute for direct engagement with the disabled communities we serve.
We also know AI's costs, environmental, social, and otherwise. We take those concerns seriously, too, while at the same time believing that disabled people should not be asked to wait for a perfect version of a technology before they are allowed to benefit from it.
If you want to talk about our approach in more detail, we are always happy to.