Accessibility Features

Digital accessibility ensures that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with AI-powered products. In conversational agents and multimodal apps, accessibility features span everything from screen-reader semantics to real-time captioning of generated audio.

Definition and Scope

An accessibility feature is any capability that removes a barrier for users with visual, auditory, motor, cognitive, or speech impairments. Common modalities include text, speech, haptics, and visual cues.

Feature Matrix by Impairment

Impairment Category	Recommended Feature	Example Implementation
Visual (blind / low-vision)	Screen-reader friendly markup; alt text for images; high-contrast themes	ARIA labels on widgets; automatic alt-text via GPT-4o vision
Auditory	Real-time captioning; visual alerts; transcript download	WebSpeech API + Whisper model for captions
Motor	Keyboard-only navigation; adjustable input timeouts	Skip-link shortcuts; dwell click controls
Cognitive	Simplified language options; focus management; adjustable text size	Easy-read mode powered by summarization model
Speech	Text alternatives to voice commands; noise-robust ASR	On-device keyword spotting fallbacks

Compliance Benchmarks

Standard	Key Requirement	Typical Target
WCAG 2.2 AA	Contrast ratio	≥4.5:1 text vs background
EN 301 549	Audio description for video	Provided for pre-recorded content
Section 508	Keyboard access	100 % functionality

Design Trade-offs

Additional UI variants add maintenance overhead.
Auto-generated alt text may hallucinate and must be user-editable.
Real-time captioning consumes compute—edge models mitigate latency but drain battery.

Current Trends (2025)

Transformer-based image captioners reach 95 % object coverage in alt-text benchmarks.
OS-level accessibility APIs expose semantic actions (e.g., "summarize this chat") that assistants can call.
Regulatory pressure (EU Accessibility Act 2025) pushes AA compliance from "nice-to-have" to baseline.

Implementation Tips

Run automated WCAG audits (axe-core, Lighthouse) on every pull request.
Offer a persistent "Accessibility" preferences panel—avoid burying settings in sub-menus.
Cache model outputs for repetitive captioning to reduce server cost.
Include people with disabilities in beta testing groups.

Command Palette