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AI is making accessibility work a lot less painful.
For years, accessibility had a reputation. Fair or not, it was the part of a project that got cut when the deadline got close. Captioning a video took hours. (Captions are the words of what is said, shown as text on the screen.) Writing alt text for a 60-image slide deck ate up most of an afternoon. (Alt text is a short written description of an image that a screen reader can read out loud. A screen reader is software that reads a screen out loud for people who are blind or have low vision.) Checking a site for color problems meant clicking through it with a tool open.
AI has not erased that work. But it has cut the boring parts down to size.
Here are a few places it really helps:
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Captions and transcripts. Tools like Otter and Descript can make a transcript as you talk. So can the built-in captions in Zoom, Teams, and YouTube. (A transcript is a written copy of everything said.) None of them are perfect. (More on that next month.) But they get you a usable first draft in minutes, not hours. Add a quick human check, and you are done.
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Alt text suggestions. Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and design tools like Figma now offer AI alt text for images. Treat it as a starting point. Fill in the “why it is here,” which AI cannot guess. You will save real time on long documents.
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Plain-language rewrites. Drop a paragraph into Claude, ChatGPT, or a tool like Hemingway. Ask for a plain version at a sixth-grade reading level. This helps people with thinking and memory disabilities. It also helps anyone reading in a second language. It works well for policy text, technical docs, and legal wording.
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Color and contrast. Tools like Stark and axe DevTools now use AI to suggest better colors, not just flag bad ones. (Contrast is the difference in lightness between text and its background. Enough contrast makes text easy to read.) Instead of “this does not pass,” you get “try this instead.”
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PDF tagging. Adobe’s AI now does most of the hard work of adding structure to PDFs. That means headings, reading order, and table tags. (This hidden structure lets a screen reader move through a PDF in the right order.) Work that used to take an afternoon now takes a few clicks and a review.
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Code suggestions. AI coding helpers will write accessible HTML if you ask. A prompt like “give me a modal with proper focus management and ARIA” gives you a surprisingly solid start. (A prompt is the request you type to an AI tool.)
Here is the thread through all of these. AI is great at the repeated, slow parts of accessibility work. Those are the parts most teams skip when time is short. By taking them off your plate, AI frees you up for the part only a human can do: making real choices about what your users actually need. That is the dream, anyway.
Next month, we will look at where AI falls apart.
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