Accessibility and generative AI: a poorly negotiated partnership

Generating image descriptions or accessible HTML structure suggestions via AI has become commonplace. It is a genuine time saver, provided you do not trust it blindly.

What AI genuinely helps with

• First drafts of alt text for large volumes of images
• Automated detection of contrast or structure issues on large sites
• Suggestions for fixing semantic HTML markup

Where the risk appears

An automatically generated image description can be grammatically perfect and semantically useless for a screen reader user, if it does not convey the information actually carried by the image in context.

The right discipline

Treat every AI output related to accessibility as a draft, never as a final deliverable. Human review - ideally by someone trained in the real usage patterns of assistive technologies - remains non-negotiable.

AI accelerates accessibility work. It does not remove the need to understand what accessibility is actually meant to serve.