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AI is going great for the blind (2023)
- paulsutter 1y ago> Now that AI is a thing now, I doubt OCR and even self-driving cars will get any significant advancements. Great to read that blind folks get so much benefit from LLMs. But this one quote seemed odd. The most amazing OCR and document attribution products are becoming available due to LLMs
- rafram 1y agoLLM/VLM-based OCR is highly prone to hallucination - the model does not know when it can’t read a text, it can’t estimate its own confidence, and it deals with fuzzy/unclear texts by simply making things up. I would be very nervous using it for anything critical.
- paulsutter 1y agoThere are really amazing products coming
- rafram 1y agoI’ll believe it when I see it.
- jibal 1y agoThe article is nearly 2 years old ... people don't have perfect foresight.
- ljlolel 1y agoThis was 2023 so I can only assume it’s gotten even better!
- simonw 1y agoThe headline is clearly meant to be sarcastic but the actual body of the text seems to indicate that AI back in 2023 was going pretty great for the blind - it mostly reports on others who are enthusiastic adopters of it, despite the author's own misgivings.
- Wowfunhappy 1y agoI did not interpret the headline as sarcastic.
- simonw 1y agoThe actual headline is: AI is going great for the blind. That . (not present in the Hacker News posting) made me think it was sarcastic, combined with the author's clear dislike of generative AI.
- ljlolel 1y agoI posted it with the period
- lxgr 1y agoIt also pattern matches to "Web3 is going just great", a popular crypto-skeptic blog – not sure if that's intentional. There seems to be a sizable crowd of cryptocurrency hype critics that have pivoted to criticizing the AI hype (claiming that the hype itself is also largely caused by the same actors, and that accordingly neither crypto nor AI have much object-level merit to them) – ironically and sadly in a quite group-think-heavy way, considering how many valid points of criticism there are to be made of both.
- PhantomHour 1y agoThere's a big difference in precisely how the technology is applied. Transformer models making screen readers better is cool. Companies deciding to fire their human voice actors and replacing all audiobooks with slop is decidedly not cool. You can really see this happening in translation right now. Companies left and right are firing human translators and replacing their work with slop, and it's a huge step down in quality because AI simply cannot do the previous level of quality. (Mr Chad Gippity isn't going to maintain puns or add notes for references that the new audience won't catch.) And that's in a market where there is commercial pressure to have quality work. Sloppy AI translations are already hurting sales. In accessibility, it's a legal checkbox. Companies broadly do not care. It's already nearly impossible to get people to do things like use proper aria metadata. "We're a startup, we gotta go fast, ain't got no time for that". AI is already being used to provide a legally-sufficient but practically garbage level of accessibility. This is bad.
- ccgreg 1y agoThe IETF AI-Preference standard group is currently discussing whether or not to include an example of bypassing AI preferences to support assistive technologies. Oddly enough, many publishers oppose that.
- 1gn15 1y agoWhat does bypassing AI preferences mean? Just ignoring them?
- ianbicking 1y agoProbably ignoring things like robots.txt, I'm guessing? But I'd be curious what exactly the list of things is, and if it's growing. Would it go as far as ChatGPT filling in CAPTCHAs? autocomplete="off" is an instance of something that user agents willfully ignore based on their own heuristics, and I'm assuming accessibility tools have always ignored a lot of similar things.
- ccgreg 1y agoA lot of publishers do not care about blind people, and would prefer that they be unable to use AI to read.
- gostsamo 1y agoThats''s one very angry take on things. As a blind person myself, AI is a net benefit, it has potential, but I also agree that there are lots of people who think that if AI solutions are good enough, there is no need to invest in actually accessible gui-s. The last one is an extremely wrong take, because ai-s always will be the slowest solution which might be badly prompted or just hallucinate. Just today someone was complaining that Gemini's code editor is not fully accessible and was looking for advice there, so I'd give the author points for mentioning that the very ai interface might be unaccessible. Not to mention that often chat web interfaces lack proper aria descriptions for some basic operations.
- simne 1y agoCould you approximate number of blind persons using AI? If their number is significant, they could themselves be foundation for some AI business, even if all other consumers will turn away from AI. For about accessibility of web, must say it is terrible even for non-blind person, but AI could also change this to better. What I mean, you may hear about PalmPilot organizers, they was very limited in hardware, but existed private company, which provided proxy-browser, which input ordinary web sites and shown on PalmPilot small display optimized version, plus have mode for offline reading. With existing AI now could do much better.
- 999900000999 1y agoEven before the LLMs, simple voice assistants have been great for those with limited sight. I recall speaking to a girl who thanked these voice assistants for helping her order food and cook. Right now I'm using AI while traveling, it gets stuff 85% right which is enough for lunch.
- rgoulter 1y ago> With an LLM, it will never get annoyed, aggravated, think less of the person, or similar. Between people, it's extremely commonly considered impolite to request excess help from other people. -- So, having an info retrieval / interactive chat which will patiently answer questions is a boon for everyone. I guess you can try and frame all 'helping' as "you're +1 if you're being helpful", but don't be surprised if not everyone sees things that way all the time.
- adhamsalama 1y agoAs long as you don't get rate-limited!
- y-curious 1y agoI guarantee you that rate limits are a thing when you ask non-impaired people for help constantly, too. I'd be taking my chances with AI rate limits for things like "describe this character in detail" and "repeat the minute-long dialog you just delivered"
- krisoft 1y ago> The blind and visually impaired people advocating for this have been conditioned to believe that technology will solve all accessibility problems because, simply put, humans won’t do it. Technology is not just sprouting out of the ground out of its own. It is humans who are making it. Therefore if technology is helpful it was humans who helped. > Let’s not mention the fact the particular large language model, LLM called Chat GPT they chose, was never the right kind of machine learning for the task of describing images. Weird. I would think LLMs are exactly the right kind of tool to describe images. Sadly there is no more detail about what they think would be a better approach. > I fully predict that blind people will be advocating to make actual LLM platforms accessible Absolutely. The LLM platforms indeed very much should be accessible. I don't think anyone would have beef with that. > I also predict web accessibility will actually get worse, not better, as coding models will spit out inaccessible code that developers won’t check or won’t even care to check. Who knows. Either that, or some pages will become more accessible because the effort of making it accessible will be less on the part of the devs. It probably will be a mixed bag with a little bit of column A and column B. > Now that AI is a thing now, I doubt OCR and even self-driving cars will get any significant advancements. These are all AI. They are all improving leaps and bounds. > An LLM will always be there, well, until the servers go down Of course. That is a concern. This is why models you can run yourself are so important. Local models are good for latency and reliability. But even if the model is run on a remote server as long as you control the server you can decide when it becomes shut down.
- NoahZuniga 1y agoGemini 2.5 has the best vision understanding of any model I've worked with. Leagues beyond gpt5/o4
- IanCal 1y agoIt's hard to overstate this. They perform segmentation and masking and provide information from that to the model and it helps enormously. Image understanding is still drastically lower than text performance, making glaring mistakes that are hard to understand but gemini 2.5 models are far and away the best in what I've tried.
- stinkbeetle 1y ago> While the stuff LLMs is giving us is incorrect information, it’s still information that the sighted world won’t or refuses to give us. I don't understand what's going on here. He's angry at us horrible sighteds for refusing to give them incorrect information? Or because we refuse to tell them when their LLMs give them incorrect information? Or he thinks that we're refusing to give them correct information which makes it okay that the LLM is giving them incorrect information?
- ants_everywhere 1y agoIt's nearly impossible to think clearly when you're angry.
- fwip 1y agoI believe they're saying that sometimes-wrong information from a machine is preferable to no information (without machine). At least to some people.
- jibal 1y ago> He's angry at us horrible sighteds It's not about you so no need to be personally offended. Have a bit of empathy and do a bit of research and it's not hard to understand that accessibility is limited.
- stinkbeetle 1y agoI'm not offended at all, just trying to understand what was written. What exactly the gripe is and what he wants. My empathy is not the problem here. Having a disability doesn't give you a free pass to be a bitter asshole.
- RianAtheer 1y ago[flagged]
- josefresco 1y agoI've been volunteering for Be My Eyes* for a few years now. It's been very rewarding. I get maybe a half dozen calls each year. I help people with very mundane and human tasks: cooking, gardening, label identification. *https://www.bemyeyes.com/download-app/ https://www.bemyeyes.com/download-app/
- miki123211 1y agoWould you be willing to share what kind of calls you usually get? No personal or sensitive details of course. Did the volume of calls change meaningfully with the introduction of AI into Be my Eyes?
- josefresco 1y agoI touched on it in my original comment. My last call was a woman who was cooking and thought maybe she had dropped some meat on the stove burner. Another call was someone stocking a refrigerator with soda, and they needed help sorting the brands. Another was a woman who wanted to know if her plant was still alive. My first call was helping a woman wrap a gift, she needed to know which side of the gift book was "up".
- Robdel12 1y agoMy mom is 100% blind, everything I build I make sure my mom can use it. I remediated visa checkout to save a tier 1 bank contract and got them to WCAG2.0 compatibility. With my “credentials” out do the way… Ugh, this is what sort of bothers me about the accessibility community. Something about it is always coming off preachy and like a moral argument. This is the worst way to get folks to actually care. You’re just making them feel bad. Look the fact is everyone needs to use technology to live these days. And us devs suck ass at making those things accessible. Even in the slightest. It won’t be until we all age into needing it when it finally becomes a real issue that’s tackled. Until then, tools like LLMs are going to be amazingly helpful. Posts like this are missing the forest in the trees. My mom has been using ChatGPT for a ton of things that’s helpful. It’s a massive net positive. The LLM alt tags Facebook added a long time ago, massively helpful. Perfect? Hell no. But we gotta stop acting like these improvements aren’t helpful and aren’t progress. It comes across as whiny. I say this as someone who is in this community.
- devinprater 1y agoI use AI, as a blind person. I posted a week or so ago a video in which I use TalkBack's image description feature to play a video game that has no accessibility at all. Of course, that was on Android which isn't the most blind-friendly of OS', and iOS doesn't have LLM image descriptions built in, nor good PS2 emulators. Other blind people are all in with the AI hype, describing themselves as partially sighted because of AI with their Meta Rayban glasses. Sidenote, Rayban glasses report that I died last year. I somehow missed my funeral, sorry to all those who were there without me. I do like brains, though... Meanwhile many LLM sites are not blind-friendly, like Claude, Perplexity, and there are sites that try but fail so exasperatingly hard that I lose any motivation for filing reports where I can't even begin to explain what's breaking so hard. It's evident that OpenWebUI have not tested their accessibility with a screen reader. Anyway blindness organizations (NFB mainly) have standardized on just use ChatGPT and everything else is the wild west where they absolutely do not care. Gemini could be more accessible, on web and especially Android, but all reports have been ignored so I'm not going to bother with them anymore. It's sad since their AI describes images well. Thank goodness for the API, and tools like [PiccyBot](https://www.piccybot.com/ https://www.piccybot.com/) on iOS/Android and [viewpoint](https://viewpoint.nibblenerds.com/ https://viewpoint.nibblenerds.com/) and [OmniDescriber](https://audioses.com/en/yazilimlar.php https://audioses.com/en/yazilimlar.php) on Windows. I'm still waiting for iOS to catch up to Android in LLM image descriptions built into the screen reader. Meanwhile, at least we have [this shortcut](https://shortcutjar.com/describe/documentation/ https://shortcutjar.com/describe/documentation/). It uses GPT 4O but at least it's something. Apple could easily integrate with their own Apple Intelligence to call out to ChatGPT or whatever, but I guess competition has to happen. Or something. Maybe next year lol. In the meantime I'll either use my own cents to get descriptions or share to Seeing AI or something like a cave man.
- bsoles 1y agoWhen my employer jumped on the bandwagon and built it's own internal wrapper around ChatGPT, I've tested it with a screen reader using keyboard navigation. And it was terrible. As long as humans don't really care about the disabled (which they really don't), I doubt the AI will solve the problems of visually impaired people.