Public Statements

Public Statements United States Supportive perspective

As a blind developer, screen description changed my work

Supportive Posted by Devon Achterberg Reading time ~ 2 min

This is community opinion, not fact. Moderated before publication.

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I have been a software engineer for eleven years and I lost most of my usable sight six years ago. Screen readers are excellent for text, but they have always been weak for diagrams, design mockups, and the kind of whiteboard photographs coworkers share in chat. For about a year I have been using image description features built into the assistants my team already pays for, and for the first time I can participate in a design review without asking someone to narrate the screen to me. That sounds small. It is not small. It changes how I am perceived in meetings and how much I can contribute without feeling like a burden. I know these models sometimes describe things incorrectly, and I always say so when I quote what the model told me. My colleagues have learned that my descriptions are a starting point, not a citation. I would like accessibility groups to be much louder in the current policy debates, because most of the coverage I read treats AI as a threat to workers or a threat to artists, and the accessibility angle barely appears. For many disabled people these tools are not a convenience. They are a door that was not open before. I support strong transparency rules and I support real evaluations for safety, but I would not want a rule so blunt that it closed the door again.
#Consumer Resources #Public Statements #Ethics & Safety

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