AccessWorld Podcast, Episode 34: Happy GAAD and Battling Isolation

Episode Notes

Welcome back to another episode of AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. In this week's episode, AFB's Aaron and Tony wish everyone a happy Global Accessibility awareness Day (#GAAD), and take a look back at how accessibility has changed over the past 15 years. They then dive into a deeper conversation around the prevalence of isolation for people with disabilities, recognizing the mental health challenges that are often pushed to the sidelines.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and our friends at NAMI have some excellent resources for those struggling with mental health issues and other ways to share your own stories and experiences during #MHAM. Talking through isolation, Aaron and Tony flashback to the pandemic days when the world began to open up over Zoom, which has become a major tool for breaking through the isolation both during and after COVID. The question now is will AI robots become the next solution for that feeling of isolation many may feel in our society, or will it mature into an adolescent bot who sits on the couch watching television and talks snarky to us all the time.

For those interested in the Apple update Tony and Aaron discussed at the top of the episode, you can learn more here.

Like what you hear? Be sure to subscribe to get the latest episode when it drops, and you can learn more about AccessWorld, including our quarterly online magazine with its 26 years of back issues free and online, by visiting: www.afb.org/aw.

AccessWorld Podcast, Episode 34 Transcript:

Introduction: AFB. You're listening to AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. AccessWorld is a production of the American foundation for the Blind. Learn more at www.afb.org/aw.

Claude: Hey, Tony, what's on your mind?

Tony Stephens: Hey, Claude, how accessible is the Internet today for people with disabilities than it was 15 years ago?

Claude: Great question. The Internet's definitely become more accessible in the last 15 years, though there's still plenty of work to do. On the positive side, accessibility standards like WCAG have become more mainstream. A lot of websites now include captions and transcripts. Screen reader technology has improved massively, and there's far greater awareness of the need for accessible design. Major platforms have built in features for people with visual, hearing, mobility, and cognitive disabilities. That said, many websites and apps still lag behind. Poor color contrast, missing alt text, inaccessible forms, that sort of thing. And the gap between what's technically possible and what's actually implemented remains pretty wide in lots of places. So it's genuinely better, but it's still an ongoing battle rather than a solved problem. Are you looking into this for a particular reason?

Tony Stephens: Well, we're recording a podcast right now. I'm just wondering, is there any data as to where we are with accessibility now? Like, how much web is accessible versus 15 years ago?

Claude: Right. That's a solid question for a podcast. Let me dig up some current data for you. So here's what the current data shows. Right now, about 95% of websites still have at least one detectable accessibility failure, which means only about 5% of the web fully meets accessibility standards. The average homepage has around 51 accessibility errors. The good news is there's been a small improvement. The error rate dropped about 10% from 2024 to 2025, which suggests slow progress is happening. As for comparing to 15 years ago, the data gets trickier pick because they weren't tracking these metrics systematically back then. But the reality is that accessibility awareness has grown massively. Standards are clearer, and litigation has spiked. Over 2,000 ADA website lawsuits were filed in just the first half of 2025. So we're definitely more aware and there's more pressure to improve, but the actual state of the web is still pretty rough.

Tony Stephens: Wow. All right, well, thanks, Claude. Thanks for visiting us. Come back anytime.

Claude: So much for having me. Tony. Really enjoyed the chat. Best of luck with the podcast, and cheers.

Tony Stephens: Well, there you go. That's. That's data.

Aaron Preece: How about that? That's about what I expected because I remember it was like, I don't know if it was at csun. I Saw that or somewhere where it was like, crazy amount that said, oh, the web is still this percent inaccessible. And I thought that can't. Because I, I rarely, if ever find from a functional standpoint, at least I rarely find. But maybe that's, Maybe the technologies come up. So if people, even if they are not deliberately making something accessible, you can still do most things. Even if there's buttons that are unlabeled or, you know, links don't show up as links and show up as plain text and all that type of stuff.

Tony Stephens: Yeah, no, for sure. So as folks are joining the podcast. Welcome back to AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. I had my friend Claude show up at the beginning there. Little, Little cameo. No, yeah, I've switched over to Claude, but. Hi, everybody, I'm Tony Stevens with the American foundation for the Blind, and I'm joined here with Aaron Priest, our editor in chief of AccessWorld. And yeah, we were starting off our conversation because, you know, today is GAD Global Accessibility Awareness Day, celebrating 15 years of campaign that was started by, you know, folks that, like Jennison Asuncion, who's now with LinkedIn, I believe, still. Well, he's still with LinkedIn. He's been there for a while, but, but Jennison and others that sort of rallied together 15 years ago to try to raise awareness. And so many other organizations focusing on disability and access have been jumping on board, which is fantastic. And we'll be talking a little bit about GAD in this episode, but we're going to be talking about some other things. But we thought it, you know, we were talking before recording just about some of this stuff and, you know, Claude kind of kicked things off. So there you go. So thanks, Claude, but yeah, man. How are you doing on Global Accessibility Awareness Day? Do you have a cake? It's 15 years.

Aaron Preece: I should get a cake. I should get that today. I'm doing pretty well.

Tony Stephens: I wonder if Dunkin Donuts or no Baskin Robbins. We had a. Oh, the ice cream. Yeah, the ice cakes was like, you know, salivating when I was a kid for birthdays or even better, Carvels. Do they have Carvels? Or did they ever have those in Huntington?

Aaron Preece: I don't think so. That doesn't sound familiar. We always did the Baskin Robbins or we did Dairy Queen, was always the big go to the Oreo. Dairy Queen.

Tony Stephens: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The, the, the, the Carvel. When I was up in New York. Well, they have them along East Coast. Not as many as it used to, but they had Cookie Puss and Fudgy the Whale, which were like these just decadent, delicious things that you would get for your birthday. And yeah, they're quite tasty. Lots of fudge in Fudgy the Whales, you would imagine.

Aaron Preece: And it sounds delicious.

Tony Stephens: Yeah, it's like that's the good quintessential kind of ice cream place in around New York. So anyways, all right, we'll try to see if we can scrape up a Fudgy the whale to celebrate 15 years of GAD. But hats off to all the folks in our sphere. They're also doing things around their organization to raise awareness. Lots of exciting stuff coming up too. I had an opportunity to get keyed in a couple days ago. Apple had some major sort of announcements to announce around their, you know, AI Intelligence, Apple Intelligence and things are doing voiceover and for mobility and like eye gaze and uses the Vision Pro that I thought were just wicked amazing in terms of leveraging technology. Were you kidding to that at all? Do you see any of the voiceover stuff I saw?

Aaron Preece: Yeah, I saw the video you mentioned where the person's using the live recognition through voiceover and you can like reads out text messages and also will tell you where, like where things are and like kind of the way you were talking to Claude, but like it's describing things to you and it was really, really snappy. I'm not sure if that's just for the video and like how that was edited, but it looked very seamless both using the, like, it seemed like it was seamless in like using voiceover to navigate the phone and then also getting that instant feedback.

Tony Stephens: Yeah, yeah, I'm excited. I teared up during the video a little just to think that we're at this point and I think it's, you know, these updates will come later in the year. Apple will have some major announcements. It sounds like in the fall one. I heard some leaks on the Internet that I'm excited about. But we don't want to, we don't want to promote false information if it's not real. But one thing was so cool in hardware. I'm like, oh man. But. But if, if these things come true and we're where Apple Intelligence is going and with voiceover and the accessibility team in Apple, it really is, you know, it's like I've thought for years and I realized this like when I started really jumping in the blindness space 15 years ago now that we had, you know, it was everything was making the device accessible. Right. How can we make this phone just Talk to me.

Aaron Preece: Talk in the first place.

Tony Stephens: Yeah, Android Jelly Bean or the OS or you know, early days of Apple iOS, you know what they were. We're almost on the 20th anniversary of the iPhone. I guess next year and then that's crazy, will be the anniversary of the 3G which I think was the first iPhone that had the voiceover built in. That, you know, we've, we've come so far. But it's not just making devices, it's making the world accessible. And that, that's, that's pretty profound when you think about it.

Aaron Preece: And I would say that's one area where we've really seen mass, maybe because of the CBAA and some of that too. But like nowadays if you get a device like if you get a tv, the TV is going to have like, it probably is going to run Fire TV or Android OS for TV and it's going to have like Talkback or Voiceview or something on it that you can turn on the watches, Apple Watch obviously has voiceover. I think a lot of the Android based watches have some kind of screen reader on them. Little just like random tablets like Kindle type tablets, especially from Amazon are going to be accessible. Just a lot of the device, like you said, the devices. Now that is, it's not a fully solved problem, but I would say it feels like there's been major strides. I can generally assume that if I'm going to pick up a piece of tech from especially a major manufacturer and it's running some kind of operating system, that it's probably going to have some level of accessibility which I never would have, you know, even 10 years ago. That wasn't the case. That's pretty cool.

Tony Stephens: I went to the periodontist the other week for like a checkup thing after having my wisdom teeth pulled a second time. After being five decades in the world, that was another story in of itself. But the blood pressure cup was talking.

Aaron Preece: Oh, that's cool.

Tony Stephens: And it wasn't like, you know, the doctor's not blind. No one in there is blind. It just, it was just talking and I was like, oh, that's cool. I mean I was a little stressed. And then I listened. I was like, oh, that's not cool with the numbers it read. I was like, oh, I gotta, I gotta eat a salad tonight. But you know, it was just really this sense of like. Yeah, it was just, it was like being out in the wild and having accessibility. And you mentioned the CVA for folks that are the 21st Century Communications Video Accessibility Act. It was passed in 2010. And it takes years for laws to get into regulations and stuff like that. But just think, you know when, when Jennison and folks launched Global Accessibility Awareness Day 15 years ago, that was only a year. Regulations hadn't even kicked in. And if we're thinking about okay, that Claude was sharing what 95% of websites have, at least something still, you know, there's one thing maybe that's tripping them up, but when you look at how the mobile revolution, smartphone revolution has made the world more accessible, not just websites, it's pretty incredible. And that's why I was so jazzed and kind of tearing up with the voiceover folks that you know, you can check out just search for like Apple accessibility and then voiceover and then there's a great video that's described that has them talking through a woman picking out her wardrobe and she can't find her keys.

Aaron Preece: Yeah.

Tony Stephens: And it is just.

Aaron Preece: Yeah. We've talked about the meta glasses a lot. Having the AI that you use all the time that knows you because like my I leave on the memory thing for ChatGPT is the one I usually use and it. So it does know things, some things about me when it comes to like it knows that I use a screen reader. It knows, it kind of knows some of my interests or things that I've talked to it about. And having that level of kind of knowledge backing up your kind of visual interpretation aspects, I could see that benefit being a major benefit to have the AI somewhat know what you want to know about the environment. Like it'll learn how to describe things to you specifically to meet your interests or your specific needs.

Tony Stephens: So I think that's.

Aaron Preece: Yeah.

Tony Stephens: So folks might not know. I have two boys, 14 and 16 year old now and it's crazy thing, they were born right around this time 15 years ago. But I don't, I don't use audio description a lot. I'm not a huge audio description user. But. But I'm kind of spoiled in that I just have two sided humans that I just kind of nudge when I want.

Aaron Preece: Yeah.

Tony Stephens: Just happened. Just that you know, and then you hear someone behind me go shh. In a theater or something. But, but you know, it's, it's interesting that it's kind of getting to that point where in our. If, if you know, when we move into that wearable space and I don't have to hold my phone out and look awkward. Well, which one of the other cool things was they, they have this cool grip. It sounds like for people with Other disabilities, dexterity and holding things and things like that for the iPhone, which is cool as a tool that you can use. But you know, this idea that it's almost like having an assistant next to you. Which kind of leads us into where we were going to be talking about today because it's also mental health awareness day. But I remember in our AI report the AI quagmire folks can go to afp.org AI research. There was stuff in there about, you know, AI being a surrogate in a sense for like mental health and things like that. But, but there's all this conversation around people becoming, building real relationships. Like almost like leaving their spouse to go run away with their AI bot.

Aaron Preece: Yeah. I've seen there. There's definitely a lot of like, I would say controversy around the whole like non utility, any kind of companionship or emotional connection.

Tony Stephens: Yeah.

Aaron Preece: With AI and whether that's healthy. Can it help people? Can it? Because it, there's a chance it could help people. And some of it depends on like how does the AI respond to you?

Tony Stephens: Does it, does it, is it codependent? Does it always want to make you happy? Is one of the ones.

Aaron Preece: Is it never going to push back on you when it maybe should? And the way they're trained and sometimes it's kind of things I forget if we've talked about it on here, if I've talked to other people about it where like when they're like doing the post training for a lot of these LLMs and they're just doing tons and tons and tons of like question response and then like grading it and telling it, you did a good job with that, you did a bad job with that and like biasing it towards a certain direction in a certain way of responding that can sometimes like the, the one that was multiple versions ago, I think it was like GPT4O was like a little too like it praised people way too much it seemed like. And they realized that was because they accidentally biased it that way without even meaning to. Because that's the, that's whenever they were like training it or post training it. That's the ones that got the like the upvote or the yeah, you did a good job with this response. And so it just, without even meaning to train it that direction, it picked that up and then you kind of can't fix it. You can say okay, stop doing that. But it's when it's baked in like that it's really hard for it to be like patched out after the fact. And so when you're looking into, especially any kind of vulnerability around mental health or what are you sharing with this? What do you. Are you opening up to it? What can. It feels like it's important to be very careful in the kinds of ways it can respond and how it can.

Tony Stephens: Yeah, but I brought it up because a minute ago you were. When you were saying a few minutes ago about how it really is set up in a way where it knows your history and it's almost like having that person, like my, you know, my family knows me better than anybody, right. Like they, they're the ones that have the backstage pass into my life. And AI is starting to get that with all this information and if it can erase that bias, because God knows my kids always don't say things to make me happy, you know, or, well, that, you know, they want, they want love from their father and mother, right? But like, they'll, they'll tell you no or they'll. A teenager will gladly say that's a dumb idea. And I feel like AI is still like a 3 year old where it just wants the praise. It just wants no. I love that, Daddy. You know, that kind of thing. Like, it's. I feel like that's where it is, but it is building this idea that we'll have this, this extension of us that's artificial, that is helping us navigate, helping the world be more accessible, that we can just talk to like it's a member of our family almost.

Aaron Preece: Mm. It's with the, like. I noticed that I'll. I use it mainly for like utility type things, but I'll notice that I'll talk to it about whatever I'm. Whatever I'm doing as if it was a person. This is mainly through like text chat, but I totally would like if I'm. Because oftentimes I'll like use it for, I don't know, like DND ideas or things like that that are, you know, hobby type stuff. And I'll totally tell it about kind of suspend the disbelief because, you know, you know how once you know how it works, you can't not know how it works like in the back end. But I think it's possible to suspend that disbelief and just. And like, I find myself all. I'll tell it things that don't necessarily need to. To get the answer that I'm looking for. But it's kind of fun in some ways.

Tony Stephens: No. And it's a far stretch from. For our Star Trekkies out there. Commander Geordi laforge. Right. Lamar Burton was In the Star Trek Next Generation that was blind but had this vision set that basically could see for him. Like, you know, I doubt they were meta glasses talking into his ear the whole time. Like somehow they wired something that gave him, you know, perception. But it is, it is, it is a bit. I don't know if I could have thought of this 15 years ago that we would be at this point where we're almost like having our own Jarvis from Iron man, you know, the Avengers kind of hanging out with us and being that support that we need to be independent. So.

Aaron Preece: Because in some ways I was thinking about like when we talk about like mental health and isolation and sometimes just physically disability, especially blindness can be isolating depending on where you live. And then I was thinking like from a, like a shared. A lot of times in AccessWorld or on here too, I've talked about, I've talked about the like, the importance of having like a shared culture, being able to participate in culture so that you can. Then whenever you are, you know, you with your friends or you go to work and people are talking about something on Monday morning, having the access to that same thing that, so you can communicate or take part in that conversation. But like, when we talk about like gaming, I'm always. I play a lot of like, audio games specifically for blind people. And I have, you know, there's friends online and stuff like that that I, that play games too, that I can talk to about those things. But in general, my friends, like locally aren't going to know anything about that or have any frame of reference for something like that. So if I find a new game that I'm playing that like, is an, is an audio game for blind people, sometimes having that, like, to where you can share that with somebody, even if it's an AI to kind of nerd out about it in a way that you wouldn't be able to necessarily because other people might not have the reference for the thing in this case, like the game, I think could be helpful.

Tony Stephens: Yeah. Well, I mean, you mentioned isolation and when we talk about this being Mental Health Awareness Month, I mean, that's probably one of the biggest dilemmas blindness has faced that we haven't focused a lot. There has been focus, there has been research, but it doesn't still drive the car towards independence as much as I think it could. Throughout history, the, the, the isolation that that comes with, with being blind, but primarily because people are. I mean, you can be in rural West Virginia, right. But you can also be in the heart of New York City and Just be stuck in your apartment because you're afraid to go out and take that first step. Like so many people. My former spouse, she was a low vision optometrist for the lighthouse in Washington D.C. for a while. And she would talk regularly about people that like, oh yeah, you know, today someone came in and they literally had been sitting on their couch for a year, afraid to go out and not get any service and they didn't know where to go. Right. Because too often we have that historical dilemma of doctors. It's starting to change a little now. But you know, doctors that don't have the best bedside manners, if they can't cure you from.

Aaron Preece: It's just like, sorry, yeah.

Tony Stephens: And so where do you go. And we get calls all the time with people like that that are like, my brother just went blind and I don't know what to do or where to go or how to get him a phone or supports or things like that. And it, it's. For a large part of the blindness population historically there's been enormous isolation and a lot of it is just by people not being able to get out. And if you're in a rural area, it's even harder because let's say you do get a cane or dog, where do you go and how do you interact with people? But yeah, that's, that was, that was probably for me when I went totally blind when I was 15, the biggest. I just spent a lot of time in my bedroom, which a lot of teenagers do anyways in the. But you know, it was in the dark listening to really depressing B sides of Pink Floyd records, which probably wasn't the most healthiest way to cope losing your sight. But you know, I don't know if you want to share as well, but like, you know that because your, your transition, I know, was more gradual, I guess. But like, it was, it was, it was a tough time, you know, and we don't, we don't let people give that space and talk about it after they go blind too much.

Aaron Preece: Where I feel like where I was basically, I would say low, severely low vision since birth. I had a little bit of an easier transition into blindness. And like, when I moved where I am now, I deliberately moved downtown where I could walk and that type of thing. But one thing for me, I don't know if I've mentioned it here, if it's come up, I'm sure, but I have a kidney transplant. And when you have a kidney transplant, you're on immune suppressant drugs and that is a disability. In itself, especially Covid, that was like. All the stuff is like, oh, you'll probably survive Covid, unless you're these categories. That was always that one category.

Tony Stephens: Top of the list there for a while.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, top of the list. So. So, like there before COVID I was going out in person a lot. I would go out with friends and we, you know, hit up the beer garden and the, you know, restaurants and do activities and all these things and then covet, hit, and there's just none of that. And, you know, you living. Like I said, I'm living downtown specifically, so I can go out and do the things I want and that sort of thing and going from that to nothing because I had to be so careful. I even moved out into the. We had my grandmother's house still at the time. And so I moved out to my grandmother's house out in Wayne County, West Virginia, which is super rural. And so I couldn't even if I wanted to. You can't really walk anywhere because there's just a highway and.

Tony Stephens: But no one's going to be sneezing around you.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, no one's going to be. I was safe from COVID I didn't get Covid till 2023, but I. Yeah, but, yeah, that was, you know, physically isolating. And also I was so glad to have online communities in that time. Our Dungeons and Dragons game moved online and we use this. I don't know if people are. How many people are familiar with Discord. I think I reviewed it a couple years ago, but it's a. I'm sure your kids do it. Use Discord to talk to their friends and stuff. But it's a. It's a great platform for like, staying connected because you have voice, chat and that type of thing. And I've hung out with my. My DND guys. And then I also found a couple of blindness. Just a lot of people were going online and trying to, like, keep up that social interaction. And that was a. Like a mental health savior at the time, being able to pop on and just like, hang out with people and just chat and.

Tony Stephens: Yeah. So the whole blindness community, if we go back six years ago to when it was, like, now. In fact, it was about right now six years ago. Cindy hall is. Eric Bridges and I were still at the American Council of the Blind. Eric's our CEO here at afb, but I was leading communications at acb. And Cindy Hollis, who was there, launched what was called the ACB community. And we were really lucky because, you know, prior to 2020, there weren't a lot of accessible online chats. And like, like you mentioned Discord, My boys, My youngest son, his best friend was literally four row homes away. 13ft a row home. So that's like what, 13 times what, like, you know, like 60ft away. His best friend. And he couldn't see him. Right? Like, we were all locked in and nobody wanted to see anybody. Like, you know, you didn't break your bubble, the protective bubble, you know, just even if it was your best friend. And, and they, they went to Discord and the blindness community. I remember with the, the ACB community, which is still around today, and it's. But started to crop up these virtual meetings, which was great because people that were isolated in places like you could still talk. And then it, it grew into more like, you know, first it was just chats, like, how could, like what Discord could be? But then it became like, okay, here's a widowers group, here is a newly blind group. Here's a seniors group, here's a student's group. Here's people that like games that are virtual. Here's Carrie. And then it grew into like karaoke nights and game shows and all these things. And they would have. I think at one point There were like 400 community meetups a week that she was hosting like an insane crazy. And it was just, you know, we were just. We had to get all these Zoom licenses. But it was incredible. And you start realizing the people on the call and this gets back into the mental health and isolation we were kind of talking about earlier. But it moved into like, we would start hearing people that had never really talked to anybody that were blind. Like they had been locked in. Like, that was a big thing for a lot of people that were blind. When Covid happened, our response to the rest of the world was like, yeah, welcome to our world. Like, this is what we deal with all the time. Welcome to isolation. That feeling that you feel like Mr. Completely able bodied person that's down the street. This is what we've been feeling like for years.

Aaron Preece: It's nice with stuff like Discord and even like social media to have that centralization too. Because I know like growing up there were. There were like servers you could join because like some guy in his bedroom set up a server on like Team Talk or something was like the, the go to thing for a while back in the mid 2000s. But like finding those and then getting to that now you can just look up the. There's like a Discord server search and you just search up blind and you'll find all kinds of servers. And so just think the discoverability is so nice with the modern tools. But yeah, that's.

Tony Stephens: And that just that they're that much more accessible because at the time teams wasn't very accessible. WebEx wasn't very accessible.

Aaron Preece: Zoom was it?

Tony Stephens: Pretty much, yeah. Zoom was it. And then that was only 45 minutes for most people. Right. But then. And then Discord. But like it. And I think maybe I misspoke with Cindy. It might have been a hundred a week. And then I remember Crest 100. So it was like more than 400amonth. But that's still an enormous amount of meetups. Right. That it's almost like you could. You could go to like Mr. Hooper's store in Sesame street and always find someone to talk to. And it was like that in a sense. And. And yeah, it is. It is incredible that you can go online now and you know, the idea of connection with isolation with other humans is I'd like to think significantly improved. It'd be great to see a longitudinal study that covers the six years and how people, you know, is isolation becoming less an issue in our community because people are more.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, because it seems like those things have continued. I know I like some of that has fallen off now that Covid's kind of. It's still around but it's not really pandemic levels anymore. But it feels like a lot of those things did stick around. I know I'm involved in several. Just like Discord or not even Discord, but just like things that might have been in person before are now online. And in some ways it makes it easier to get to a lot of stuff when you don't have to travel somewhere and travel back and all that type of thing just for blind and sighted alike. And I'd be curious. Yeah. What the. The rates of isolation and how people feel now since it does seem like a lot of that stuck around and kind of been absorbed into the culture at large.

Tony Stephens: It'll be interesting with AI when we get to this point. Like I said, feels like a three year old always wanting to make you happy and tell you yes and wants your love and affection to the point where maybe they'll overcompensate and it'll become an angry teenager. Like it's adolescence. You know. When are we going to hit the eyes?

Aaron Preece: It's just gonna tell you no for every teenager.

Tony Stephens: Yeah. Just tell you to go. Tell you exactly where to go versus to the point where it is also adding to this idea that, you know, I still gotta find time and find meetings and carve out time versus just again having a wearable pair of glasses that I can just talk to and it'll talk back to me. You know, if I'm feeling down. Play me a song to so, you know, like just kind of read when will it get to a point of intelligence? Really augmenting that. And again that gets into the whole thing. Is it evil? Like are we not. Not evil in a sense? Are we going to no longer have a need for human interaction?

Aaron Preece: I know that's the, that's the concern. And also just like the, the privacy aspect. How much do you really want the AI to know about you? And how much do you want, you know, Claude to know about you? But how much do you want Anthropic to know about you? You know there's like there.

Tony Stephens: IBM has their. In 2029, they're saying they're coming out with that whole quantum computer is their mission. Where it's like we can take this stuff offline and imagine that'll impact privacy and make it to where if we have AI robots, they won't need to be connected to the cloud.

Aaron Preece: That's the idea. Yeah.

Tony Stephens: They can work underground, they can, you know, fun. But it's. Yeah, it'll be interesting. This AI quantum. I can't remember the actual name of their project, but it's like this quantum computing project to basically be able to take this stuff offline because you can

Aaron Preece: kind of do that now. But the models are like the equivalent of. They do all. They do some crazy things where they'll have a giant model and then somehow they can like distill it down. I don't really know how that tech works, but you're still getting. It's not nearly as intelligent when the ones that you can run on, on consumer hardware right now. But people do do that for that specific reason. Like if you can fine tune it, say to code, then you don't have to worry about like if I'm using it to code things, do I want to send my company's top secret, you know, secret code for a proprietary software to, you know, Google servers or whoever else's servers that you can just do it locally. But I, I think that'll be very cool. Especially for latency too.

Tony Stephens: Yeah. I Wonder in like 20 years if the way that malls feel like they are now where there's a lot of. There's an abandoned mall south of Baltimore. It's real creepy to walk through. There's like one store Left, two stores left. And I wonder if these data centers will just be these boxes out in farmlands and suburbs not really being.

Aaron Preece: Yeah.

Tony Stephens: Quantum wise offline, you know, out of these. And then we don't feel guilty about how many bottles of water did I ex expel asking him to cool it. Just to ask it like, you know how to make a quiche.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, exactly.

Tony Stephens: Yeah. Oh man, it's. It's. It's strange to be at this time in history. Like, it's just. I can't even imagine what my boys will live through. But yeah.

Aaron Preece: Yeah. That's crazy to think you're the idea that there are people now that are going to grow up without just grow up with AI as just part of life. Just like the way kind of current younger generations grew up without like they always had social. Not just the Internet, but they always had social media, which was so different from the. At least my experience as a, you know, teenager in the 2000s was even though we had the Internet, it was very different from what people like what teenagers experience now with the more interconnectedness. And what's that going to mean when with AI.

Tony Stephens: Yeah. Yeah. They won't, they won't know what a flip. Well, although I did hear isn't are they coming out with a flip phone iPhone. But like, you know, they won't know the idea of having to push physical buttons.

Aaron Preece: Yeah. And is there like a. I feel like there's been something where I saw where people are because of like the tech. Somewhat of like the tech overload of just like the media content overload. People are deliberately going back to more analog things. Deliberately going for my oldest loves vinyl. Yeah. Like phones and that type of stuff. Reading physical books and that type of thing.

Tony Stephens: Yeah. I brought a typewriter out for the Helen Keller awards. An old 1940s Remington quiet writer, which was the type Helen used. So we had it set up in a little table with some.

Aaron Preece: That's cool.

Tony Stephens: Letter from Helen. And there was someone on her staff. I won't say the name, but it was like, what is this? You know.

Aaron Preece: Yeah.

Tony Stephens: And I don't think they understood like how to put the paper in. You know, it was like, no, this is how we did it. Even when I was a kid.

Aaron Preece: I'm not that old because that was right when my Generation transitioned to PCs, if nothing else as a Microsoft Word machine for a lot of people.

Tony Stephens: So what would be your supervision idea of the future? Like maybe shouldn't use the revision our uber AI bot. Like would you use something like that or Would it just be kind of annoying?

Aaron Preece: I would probably use something like that. It just depends on what it does. And because, like, there's the idea of like the. Right now they're not really feasible as far as I could tell, but basically a robot AI that could like do tasks and basically like help you around the house and that type of stuff,

Tony Stephens: and it does dishes for you. And I'm like, really?

Aaron Preece: Yeah. I don't know that. I don't think that really works great. So far from the things I've seen, they still kind of have to have someone remote in to do that, which I would not want personally. But if it's on the local hardware, I could see something like that being helpful. Even just like right now it's like, oh, I dropped my AirPod. Where is it? And you can try to figure it out with the, with the glasses or with the camera. But. But if the bot, if there's a bot that can go, oh, it's right there, I'll grab it for you. Like in some ways is that I would be like, will that lower my personal independence if I offload? Because I know, like, you hear about like cognitive offloading with AI, like, if you're just like. I kind of try to avoid that. I only really use AI for stuff that's either like super tedious or stuff that I'm never going to like coding. Like, I, I like the idea of coding. I'm. I've got other things I'm working, you know, working on personally, like piano and various other things. So I'm not gonna. I don't think I'm ever gonna have the time to learn to code at the level that I want to. So I don't, I don't mind offloading coding to the AI because I'm never gonna code in the first place. So that's not a skill I was ever going to develop in the first place. But if I let the AI, like a physical AI bot, do all these things, you know, clean my house and stuff, what will that do to my personal skills? Or if I'm just sighted, guiding with the AI around versus like using because I guess be similar with the guide dog. But like, there's that concern, I think.

Tony Stephens: Well, even our mobility, like, you know, one of the concerns when accessible pedestrian signals first started to come out, the audible ones, is that going to make us lose our, our training from orientation mobility to just listen to traffic and be sure. Right?

Aaron Preece: Yeah.

Tony Stephens: So if we get to an intersection where it's out and there's more of those in Baltimore than not, you know, it's. What do you do then? Do you. Do you lose. Do you lose your language skills of having to speak a different language the same way that. Would you lose your orientation mobility skills of being able to be independent essentially? Would it make us more stranded by making us more accessible?

Aaron Preece: Yeah, I know at least with like, I don't really use my cane very much because I have Dunsmere. So I, I notice when I do need to use a cane that I can still do it, but I definitely don't feel as confident with it. And I've. I've heard somewhere, and I don't know how accurate, I'm not a, you know, neuro expert or anything for sure, but I feel like I heard that like our brains deliberately are trying to find the most efficient way to do things. So if it thinks I don't need to do this anymore, it will absolutely offload things it doesn't think you need or something like that, where it's trying to be as efficient as possible. So if you offload a task to something else, then it is going to say, I don't need to know how to do this, or I don't need to. I can shelve that for now or something like that. And there is that concern with. And that's not really a AI specific thing because you'll see, like I saw a study about that with AI causes this kind of cognitive. I'm thinking just personally, it didn't seem like that was really the, the framing. I didn't personally love. It felt like, oh yeah, this is just how our brains work. But that is a concern. Or you want to think about what skills do I want to retain and what am I willing to offload because your brain will take advantage of that.

Tony Stephens: Well, we're still a long way away, I feel like from when our AI Bot will be sitting on the couch watching anime, refusing to wash dishes.

Aaron Preece: Yeah.

Tony Stephens: That's when we know it's truly one more episode. Yeah, yeah. What do you mean you're not going to do what I told you? But a new one piece is on AI Bot. Get up there and work. No, it's, you know, in the interim, you know, there are stuff out there we have come a long way in terms of battling that isolation, going back to the mental health again, that it's, it's been a transformative six years for sure, since the pandemic,

Aaron Preece: for sure.

Tony Stephens: And just maybe it can help with that. I don't know. We'll see.

Aaron Preece: Yeah.

Tony Stephens: Yeah. If Anything. Just sometimes you need to hear another voice. My dog.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, for sure.

Tony Stephens: Much.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, mine's snoring under the table.

Tony Stephens: Yeah. If folks are interested in finding out about that community I mentioned, because they still do do a lot of meetings in a great group at American Council of the Blind. You can email communitycb. Or if you want to check out information on our AI Quagmire study that looked into all things around attitudes with AI and how AI is sort of impacting different parts of our life and part of that is around mental health. You can go to afb.org AI research, as I mentioned, and download the accessible version of that report. Or maybe even you can ask Claude. Maybe it's in Claude now.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, they might know. Also check out our podcast on it. We did a podcast back at the end of. Was it the end of February, early March, something like that.

Tony Stephens: All right, so it was six episodes ago or so. Five, six episodes.

Aaron Preece: So yeah, it's crazy.

Tony Stephens: Yeah. We're releasing many reports as well coming out. I think our team's working on one around transportation right now and AI which ties into our episode last episode. But yeah, so you know, a lot of more mini reports around AI. It will continue. As sick as people are to hear about it, it will continue, but in a good way. Like again, I'm stoked about the Apple announcement the other day and I can only imagine that, you know, the other counterparts on our accessibility cohorts around the major platforms are also thinking these things through and more innovation this year. If it's whatever Google Glass comes out or if it's whatever. Yeah, it's like it's again a transformative time that we're all living together.

Aaron Preece: So we think maybe VR will come back to as like because you talk about the, the Vision Pro with the, the eye tracking and stuff like that. I always thought that was from like an anti isolation standpoint. You. I don't know if people are familiar with like the Ready Player one where they like everything's in virtual and you're in like the virtual classroom and that could, I mean I could see the benefit there. There are some stuff out. Nothing accessible really so far but I always thought that was promising. I'd love to see more with that.

Tony Stephens: Yeah, we still need to get out and get, get moving and try to live a healthy life.

Aaron Preece: But.

Tony Stephens: But yeah, that Ready Player One was so science fiction but not that long ago to feel so like today.

Aaron Preece: I was gonna say. Yeah, lots of. A lot of the tech is kind of here. It's just the distribution and like the resources invested in something like that is not really there. But the, the capability for the, at least the first book is kind of crazy that that's here.

Tony Stephens: Yeah, for sure. Wow. Well, Aaron, Happy Gad. Happy 15th anniversary for everyone celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day today. And you know, for folks, maybe, you know, someone that's newly blind, maybe you're newly blind or dealing with dramatic, you know, impact in your vision and your sight, you know, there's, there's resources out there, there's folks that you can talk to and you know, even if you need an A about to tell you a good story, although it's not the same as, you know, it's, it's not the same. I say as a parent who used to always read my kids make believe stories, I would just make them up because I couldn't actually. My braille was horrible with kids books.

Aaron Preece: Oh, gotcha.

Tony Stephens: You know, it's not, it doesn't replace a human, but it can help, so.

Aaron Preece: But cool Augment. Yeah.

Tony Stephens: All right, well, we'll talk to folks next episode. In the meantime, Aaron, thanks so much, man.

Aaron Preece: Thank you.

Tony Stephens: You've been listening to Accessworld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. Accessworld is a production of the American Foundation for the Blind, produced at the Pickle Factory in Baltimore, Maryland. Our theme music is by CosMonkey, compliments of ArtList.io. To email our hosts Aaron and Tony, email communications@afb.org. To learn more about the American foundation for the Blind or even help support our work, go to www.afb.org.

Outro: AFB