You know why some blind people are really leaning into AI to fix accessibility issues? No, not like overlays that probably barely have any if/else statements in them, let alone AI, but stuff like Be My Eyes, and gasp screen recognition in VoiceOver for iOS? Because shit sucks, and it's sucked for the last 40 years of computing history for blind people. That's why whenever we get even a bit more light, even if 20% of what an AI says is fake, that 80%, that gives us 80% more info than we didn't have before. And yeah, we should all, every single one of us, know that AI can give false info by now. Hell, Mastodon folks have been shoving that into our ears with an oversized cue tip since the day ChatGPT came out. We get it. But hot damn, being able to point my phone out the bus window and take pictures as I'm going to work, hearing about a fire station, or a house with a dog in the yard, or that it's a sunny, clear, nice day outside even, is really freaking nice. And sure, maybe it's not a firestation. Maybe it's a courthouse, or a post office, or something else. but it's something that I would never have known before. Because I don't have some sighted person telling me about what's around, and I wouldn't want any other human to have to do that for me. Like, this is the thing. In order to get 100%, perfect info, I'd have to hire another human who, all they do is look around and tell me in extreme detail, what's around me? Now, sighted people of Fedi, would you want that job? Maybe for a day. Maybe for a week. But months of that? I doubt it. And that is where AI comes in. No, it ain't perfect. And the more you deviate from its training data, the less accurate it gets. And maybe eventually we'll get to a point in the middle of what VoiceOver Recognition is, and what LLM's are. But I'm just getting tired of this OMG AI is the end of the world rhetoric. It's really getting old.
