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You know, it’s not just the “new” AI image recognition stuff that gets things wrong. Remember the old VoiceOver Recognition of like a year or two ago? Yeah, that gets things wrong too. We shouldn’t be surprised that AI gets things wrong. The only reason why abled people are so shocked about it is because they’ve not had to use it for the past 30 or more years. You know what OCR is? Yep, AI. Or, AL as some OCR programs call it. Why? Cause it got it wrong. Yeah, it’s a different kind of wrong, but AL does not equal AI. And yes, screen readers know the difference.

Now, some may say that a letter here or a symbol there doesn’t make OCR bad. But imagine having to use that on a PDF for work purposes. Yeah, you may want it to be a bit more precise in those contexts. You want it to always get numbers correct, for example. 500 is a bit more than 300, or 100, for example.

Now, we blind people have used OCR for a long time. It has improved majorly since even the first KNFB Reader phone. Yeah, actual hardware. That was better than the reading machine, a huge device just for the purpose. So when we see AI make stuff up, or get things wrong, and we’re used to it. It is what it is, and we cope just fine. We either accept the info as junk, like some OCR results, or ask someone else who knows better, like a sighted person that can look at the OCR’d text. Oh, that word Canada is actually the Canadian flag? Yeah.

So when sighted people are all in deep, bright, red rage about OpenAL (see that?) and AI, I kinda am like, “Yeah welcome to our world.” We get incorrect or incomplete info all the time. You think our canes tell us about that cat sitting up there in a tree to the left? Or that wasp just waiting to sting something? Haha no. We have to adjust to things *all, the, time.* And these models are just getting started, like OCR in the 80’s. They *will* get better. But yeah welcome to AI, abled people.

#accessibility #AI #blind

—@devinprater