Jakob Nielsen asserts that accessibility has failed to serve disabled users because of a mistaken focus on standards. This approach is unable to address the wide variety of disabilities, and because it is by definition a derivative of a GUI, it is doomed to provide a second-class experience to e.g. blind users. He points out differing needs by older and less literate users, and proposes generative UI as a promising solution. https://www.uxtigers.com/post/accessibility-generative-ui I was skeptical of the headline and tweet-length summaries. There has been not-insignificant backlash. The full article leaves me still skeptical but certainly willing to see where the idea of bespoke-to-one's-needs UIs could take us.

Wow, this reminds me of work I did in 1989 on "intelligent user interfaces" for a company called EASAMS, my first graduate job. It didn't get anywhere because (a) neural networks and AI generally weren't up to it and (b) the in-house sponsors didn't really think it was worth further time investment. I'm struggling to remember the details, but it was about inferring the user's intentions and goals, then adjusting the UI in real time to support them. So the UI became an extension of the user. In its simplest incarnation, to get over those moments when you shout at the computer "but you already knew that!!!"

If you are going to read Nielsen’s piece, I encourage you to also check out this response from Brian DeConinck Brian is, in my opinion and experience the most down-to-earth and expert accessibility voice actually doing the work everyday.

it always reminds me of the ramp VS bionic legs thing. let's say your venue has some stairs at the front door, and people in wheelchairs struggle to enter it, there are various things you can do: • carry the person up the stairs. • add a ramp (in addition to the stairs). • replace the ramp with some stairs (and never build stairs again). This is a common example that gets taught in teacher training for how to think about accessibility in the classroom (context: i used to work in Special Educational Needs). the best option in this metaphor is to start by building a ramp, then everyone can enter together, and you don't have to do any extra work, and everyone can be independent. I've been using this metaphor recently in tech accessibility, because the proposed solution is often something like: • build an AI assisted Iron Man megasuit that lets the person fly in this case, thats what it seems like to me. I guess there's a common mentality that technology will be the only answer to all our problems. I quote: "Supporting Disabled Users Requires Generative UI". i think that we need ramps, not iron man suits, which requires societal change, not technological change

Re: DeConinck's interpretation of Nielsen as saying "2. Some kind of automated tool detects information about the user, including their disability status." — the idea I had was more that the disability status would happen user-side, or as an interaction

Consider the intrinsic potential malleability of software compared to the rigidity of the built environment. Perhaps the software equivalent to the ramp is the ability to easily perform one-off customizations of things. Hmm, concrete real examples...

I don't know if the ramp vs stairs analogy is useful here. In software, what's a ramp to some people is a wall to others. An audio interface that helps visually impaired people does nothing for the deaf. If you try to accommodate them both with touch, you'll lose quadriplegics. There's no intersection of interaction capability.

Re: the ramp analogy, it doesn't take into account Nielsen's point that critiques accessibility standards for being a derivative of the non-accessible design. I acknowledge DeConinck's counterargument that "Before you design your interface, you could make a plain text outline", which would make the accessibility approach...somewhat less of a derivative? Still. What proportion of the web is built that way? When I estimate the proportion I think we could achieve, the analogy that comes to mind is more elevators than ramps. I'm pro-elevator but we can't just hand-wave away the effort of redesigning our built environment and ways of working.

What proportion of the web is built with generative UI? And why does that matter? Clearly most of the web is bad for usability, and if you care about that then you're already resigned to making big changes.

DeConinck:

In other words, some users get the full experience, the one with all the words, all the context, and all the options. But if Nielsen’s AI thinks you have a disability, you’ll get a different experience, a simpler experience that’s more appropriate for people like you. It’s an ugly kind of paternalism with a new AI twist.

In contexts where I have been disabled, yes — this is precisely what I wanted. Less context, less precise, more gist, simpler, more appropriate for someone like me. Where I diverge from his vision of how this has to work is that I want control over the algorithm to be in my hands. I say what my needs are today, with all knobs available to be tuned.

Since it’s just too hard to follow accessibility best practices—plain language, a coherent document structure, support for a broad set of user agents—let’s just design UIs for us regular people and let the algorithm dumb it down for the edge cases.

You literally cannot persuade the German people to write in plain language with a coherent document structure. It's not a realistic proposal; yes it is too hard. I would prefer a harm reduction strategy that works around the reality that UIs are designed for "regular people" [sic] and alternatives must be based on that fundament.

I know what you meant. My point is that it's a bad question.

Sorry, I hear you now

In your hands as the end user? I don't think that's what Nielsen is talking about. I don't think it's all that likely, either. Most companies aren't interested in offering the full featured APIs to their customers that would be needed to make that work. They could do that today if they wanted, but they don't. If you mean in your hands as a developer, that's not even a hypothetical for accessible HTML or outline-oriented UI, you can do that right now. So I don't see how that puts generative UI ahead, either.

The ramp example (however suitable it may be as an analogy for software) actually illustrates the absence of a universal solution for accessibility problems. There are people who can use stairs but not ramps, because their ankles are too stiff to deal with the slope.

An angle perhaps missing from consideration here, but gestured at, is assistive technology, like screen zoom, screen readers, braille displays, voice control, etc. They offer alternative modes of mediation between person and interface.

I'm still team ramp TBH. ie: i believe we've had the technology for accessibility for a long time. a new and even more complicated and even more expensive technology is not going to be the thing that makes accessibility better. if anything, i think the natural inclination (as we see here) is to use it as an excuse to care less about accessibility. am i just being cynical?

Ramps are a honking great idea, let's do more of those. I just don't think they're a total solution. I don't think there can be one.

Related to building ramps, the 1st edition of "Teaching Accessible Computing" was just released and is free to the public! > For computing to work for everyone, it must be accessible to everyone. Alas, it is not: people with disabilities in mobility, vision, hearing, learning, attention, and more regularly face software that is hard or impossible for them to use. One reason for this is that when we educate future software engineers, we rarely teach them anything about accessibility. This limits their ability to find and fix accessibility defects and advocate to their organization to prioritize those fixes. More importantly, it limits the capacity of software organizations to design software that is accessible from day one. https://bookish.press/tac

My sort of trite way of framing it:

Whereas mobile-first design and development invited folks to think more expansively about the physical reality of the devices people use, accessibility-first design and development invites folks to think more expansively about the lived experiences, and physical reality of actual people.

@Lu Wilson I agree that many accessibility issues can be solved with old and well-known tech. I think it doesn‘t happen because people don‘t look at the tech from that perspective. And for the hard-core tech people, accessibility is not a priority because there is no glory to be found there.

When Nielsen talks about the UI being completely different for every user, and even on every use of the app, he only stops to soothe the designer. This is wildly off-track to me: the ability to become familiar with and make the app predictable is really important to several classes of disabled users. Or for that matter, all users! Who wants a UI that changes on them all the time? I’m also very intrigued how he envisages support working, both at the local scale by those surrounding disabled users, and “at scale” by app builders serving their customers

guys it's simple we need to make accessibility sexy

Ironically, Nielsen got slapped once upon a time for exactly that