"Accessibility people, you go work on that thing of yours over there": Addressing Disability Inclusion in AI Product Organizations

TL;DR

This study explores how AI practitioners address disability inclusion, revealing challenges and proposing process improvements to better serve users with disabilities in AI products.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into practitioners' experiences with accessibility and responsible AI, highlighting gaps and suggesting new resources and processes.

Findings

Practitioners face friction at the intersection of responsible AI and accessibility.

Gaps exist in data about users with disabilities.

Community groups support disability inclusion efforts.

Abstract

The rapid emergence of generative AI has changed the way that technology is designed, constructed, maintained, and evaluated. Decisions made when creating AI-powered systems may impact some users disproportionately, such as people with disabilities. In this paper, we report on an interview study with 25 AI practitioners across multiple roles (engineering, research, UX, and responsible AI) about how their work processes and artifacts may impact end users with disabilities. We found that practitioners experienced friction when triaging problems at the intersection of responsible AI and accessibility practices, navigated contradictions between accessibility and responsible AI guidelines, identified gaps in data about users with disabilities, and gathered support for addressing the needs of disabled stakeholders by leveraging informal volunteer and community groups within their company. Based on these findings, we offer suggestions for new resources and process changes to better support people with disabilities as end users of AI.