How People with Disabilities Are Using AI to Improve Their Lives
For a long time, technology has been opening opportunities for people with impairments, from motorized scooters to hearing aids. And, in the next years, AI will begin to boost those efforts by providing new capabilities and wider access. With over one billion disabled individuals worldwide, there is plenty of work to be done—and a vast market to tap into.
Disabilities can be permanent, temporary, or situational, and can affect vision, hearing, mental health, learning, cognition, or movement. Creating new products with various degrees of ability in mind, a notion known as inclusive design, has gone a long way toward ensuring that technology works for everyone.
Research into how perceptions are created, how people may infer each other’s feelings and ideas, and what defines emotional intelligence has improved as technology has. These discoveries can be turned into algorithms that allow robots to read speech, gestures, and complicated verbal and nonverbal clues, as well as learn from feedback.
Making design more generally accessible benefits others who do not have a disability. One of the first typewriters was inspired by a creator’s wish to help his blind friend—some say lover—write more legibly. Alexander Graham Bell’s mother was deaf, and his work with the deaf population inspired his creation of the telephone.
Audiobooks were developed recently as a means for the blind to enjoy reading. Video captioning was created to make content compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), but it is now used by anyone watching videos who cannot hear the audio.
Developing new tools could aid in the integration of a part of our population that has frequently been excluded from ordinary daily living activities and career prospects. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for Americans with disabilities is twice as high. Only one out of every ten persons in the world has access to assistive products.
It is not only large corporations who are pioneering in this field. Ava, an app that allows deaf and hard of hearing people to participate in group chats in English or French (with more limited use for Spanish, Italian, German, and Russian), has been used by over 100,000 people. Everyone in the room opens Ava on their phones and speaks normally as the app listens in. Ava turns spoken words into text in near real time, color-coding each speaker’s phrases for those who need to read along to follow the chat.
Products aimed for a general audience are also being used to improve accessibility. Smart assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri have become invaluable resources for blind users, allowing them to access the internet more effortlessly. Users are also developing innovative techniques to make voice-based assistants accessible to the deaf. Using a webcam, one effort enabled an Echo to interpret and respond in sign language.
These tools, which all use artificial intelligence, aim to improve the detection, teaching, and assistance of people with learning difficulties. Some are already in use in schools, while others are still in the research stage.