So true, but I think we've got to take it a bit farther.
There's these very cool supplemental-to-the-WCAG documents that help people think about why certain guidelines are the way they are, like these user stories related to cognitive disabilities. That's an amazing resource we have for free, and it's probably a great way to supplement the even more amazing resource of real-life user feedback! It's just hard to sift through if you don't already know what you're ctrl+f'ing for.
I would be very worried about an AI service that tried to explain why certain guidelines were necessary, but I wonder if they could help somehow with discoverability of the information in epic-length, expert-written documents like those supplemental guidelines.
Fun story, I was playing around on chatgpt today, pretending to be a new developer who knew to value accessibility, but had no intuition for it yet. I asked if it could help show me how to do a marquee and it said "no, that's deprecated and inaccessible" so I said "oh okay, how could I make text scroll across the screen in an an accessible way?" and it happily wrote up some (very buggy) css animations code to make some "accessible" scrolling text. It was hideous and distracting and very very funny. (It also gave my animated bouncing links aria labels and roles that <a>'s already implicitly have when I asked it to help me make the site "more accessible".)
...So I think it's at least as bad as the developers at just parroting accessibility rules of thumb without being able to generalize. I certainly wouldn't want to leave one in the room with an impressionable new accessibility student unsupervised.
I agree. I think one place where ChatGPT (or GitHub Copilot Chat he says with a smile) can help is better describing the rationale behind the WCAG guidance. But as your experience demonstrated, it does depend and it does sometimes need guidance. I don't think someone could learn accessibility from AI, but I think it could further enhance their understanding.
The switch flipped for me in better understanding accessibility when I heard a screen reader for the first time. The experience others had became "real" to me as it was a site I was building.
In turn, being able to ask ChatGPT or another tool "Is this accessible" and the important follow-up of "Why isn't this accessible" helps the developer learn in real-time on a specific scenario they're currently working on. This is far more impactful, as you mention, than simply giving someone a list of rules and saying "just do this."
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So true, but I think we've got to take it a bit farther.
There's these very cool supplemental-to-the-WCAG documents that help people think about why certain guidelines are the way they are, like these user stories related to cognitive disabilities. That's an amazing resource we have for free, and it's probably a great way to supplement the even more amazing resource of real-life user feedback! It's just hard to sift through if you don't already know what you're ctrl+f'ing for.
I would be very worried about an AI service that tried to explain why certain guidelines were necessary, but I wonder if they could help somehow with discoverability of the information in epic-length, expert-written documents like those supplemental guidelines.
Fun story, I was playing around on chatgpt today, pretending to be a new developer who knew to value accessibility, but had no intuition for it yet. I asked if it could help show me how to do a marquee and it said "no, that's deprecated and inaccessible" so I said "oh okay, how could I make text scroll across the screen in an an accessible way?" and it happily wrote up some (very buggy) css animations code to make some "accessible" scrolling text. It was hideous and distracting and very very funny. (It also gave my animated bouncing links aria labels and roles that <a>'s already implicitly have when I asked it to help me make the site "more accessible".)
...So I think it's at least as bad as the developers at just parroting accessibility rules of thumb without being able to generalize. I certainly wouldn't want to leave one in the room with an impressionable new accessibility student unsupervised.
I agree. I think one place where ChatGPT (or GitHub Copilot Chat he says with a smile) can help is better describing the rationale behind the WCAG guidance. But as your experience demonstrated, it does depend and it does sometimes need guidance. I don't think someone could learn accessibility from AI, but I think it could further enhance their understanding.
The switch flipped for me in better understanding accessibility when I heard a screen reader for the first time. The experience others had became "real" to me as it was a site I was building.
In turn, being able to ask ChatGPT or another tool "Is this accessible" and the important follow-up of "Why isn't this accessible" helps the developer learn in real-time on a specific scenario they're currently working on. This is far more impactful, as you mention, than simply giving someone a list of rules and saying "just do this."