Intelligent accessibility — what if accessibility could adapt to you?
Exploring how AI can transform accessibility from static accommodations into adaptive, human-centered experiences
Four main functional disability categories — physical, vision, hearing and cognitive. Photo by bilalulker on istockphoto.com“The evolution of digital accessibility has given us principles, standards, and tools to identify and remove barriers embedded within digital experiences. But as technology moves towards increasingly dynamic, personalized, and intelligent experiences, can the inclusion of accessibility remain static as it always were till recent? — or more than ever today, do we need to rethink how the term accessibility adapts alongside the people and contexts it is designed for?”
This is a question I have been curious about quite some time. And, it is the remedy that led me to write this article.
Imagine opening a website — You see a navigation bar, a hero image, several buttons, a form to fill out, a few video clips, and a long paragraph of text. Everything appears normal. You know where things are, what they are, and how you are expected to interact with them.
Now, imagine experiencing that same website without being able to see the screen. The interface hasn’t changed, but your ability to interact with it has.
This is where the journey of accessibility begins! It is not with a checklist or a standard, but with a simple question:
How can everyone experience and interact with this in a meaningful way?
Brief history on accessibility?
The term ‘Accessibility’ wasn’t originally a digital design problem.
It grew out of a much broader movement — the recognition that people with disabilities should be able to participate equally in society. Over time, accessibility became deeply connected with ideas of human rights, equality, independence, and participation. It was never simply a matter of making spaces, services, or technologies easier to use; it was also about challenging the social and structural barriers that prevented people with disabilities from participating fully in society.
For much of the 20th century accessibility discussions-movements focused heavily on creating equal oppurtunities for people with disabilities to interact with the physical environment — buildings, transportation, public facilities, workplaces and public services.
1978 gang of 19 protest on taxation without transportation and the high-cost and difficulty of scheduling accessible public transportation. Image courtesy of the Denver Public Library/Rocky Mountain News Photograph Collection/WH2129–2022–280Gradually, however, our understanding of disability began to change. This shift did not happen in isolation. It grew through the voices, experiences, and collective actions of people with disabilities and the communities that advocated alongside them.
Instead of seeing disability only as a limitation within an individual, researchers, advocates, designers, and policymakers increasingly began to recognize the role of the environment itself in creating barriers. A person’s experience of disability is shaped not only by their impairment or health condition, but also by the physical, social, technological, and attitudinal environments around them.
This shift introduced a fundamental perspective:
Sometimes, the barrier isn’t the person’s ability. It is how the environment has been designed.
For instance, A wheelchair user isn’t inherently prevented from entering a building because they use a wheelchair; a building without an accessible entrance can create that barrier. Similarly, a blind person isn’t prevented from using a computer simply because they cannot see the screen — the absence of appropriate accessibility support can create the barrier. The WHO uses examples like these to illustrate how inaccessible environments can restrict participation and inclusion.
This way of thinking eventually became central to Digital Accessibility too.
The web has the potential to remove many barriers that exist in the physical world — like distance, mobility constraints, auditory and visual restrictions. But when the web — websites, applications, and digital technologies are poorly designed, they can create new barriers to communication, interaction, and participation.
What is accessibility
There are many definitions on Accessibility, each approaching the concept from slightly different perspectives. Nevertheless, one particularly broad definition comes from ISO 9241 the international standard covering human-system interaction. It says:
“Accessibility is the extent to which products, systems, services, environments and facilities can be used by people from a population with the widest range of user needs, characteristics and capabilities to achieve identified goals in identified contexts of use.”
In simple terms Accessibility means, making sure people with different abilities can access, understand, and use something to achieve what they want to do. It doesn’t specify towards people with disabilities as people can be temporarily disable.
However, Accessibility isn’t only about who is using a product. It is also about, what they are trying to achieve and the circumstances in which they are trying to achieve it — the context. Because a person may be perfectly capable of completing an interaction in one situation and encounter a barrier in another.
A boy experiencing temporary hearing difficulty. Photo by Pluto Mossa on UnsplashFor example, Someone who normally relies on audio may suddenly find themselves in an environment where they cannot listen to sound. Someone may be able to comfortably read a screen in a quiet room but struggle to see it in bright sunlight. Someone with full motor control may temporarily have only one hand available. In each of these situations, the person’s underlying ability has not necessarily changed But the — context has.
What is web accessibility
While technology became increasingly integrated into everyday life, accessibility concerns naturally moved into the digital world, resulting the development of one of the most influential foundations in digital accessibility — Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). It was first developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1999, and is being evolving since then.
The W3C Web Accessibility initiative defines:
“Web Accessibility is the principle that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them equally.”
In practical terms, this means enabling everyone to perceive, understand, navigate, and contribute to the web without barriers.
Furthermore, WCAG has provided recommended four design foundations when testing whether a product product is truly accessible. These principles are named as POUR in short format:
- (P)Perceivable — Information and interface components should be presented in ways users can detect. (E.g., Text alternatives for images or captions for videos)
- (O)Operable — Interface components should be usable through different inputs, including keyboards-only use.
- (U)Understandable — Information and interactions should be clearly understandable and predictable.
- (R)Robust — Content should work reliably across current and future assistive technologies like screen readers and user agents.
Therefore, by adapting these principles into their design practice, designers can begin asking questions such as:
- Can this interface be navigated using a keyboard?
- Can a screen reader understand the structure of this page?
- Does this image have an appropriate text alternative?
- Is there sufficient contrast?
These questions help designers move beyond simply considering accessibility as a checklist and instead build accessibility into the design process from the beginning — keeping a diverse range of people and contexts in mind.
Another important insight is — A website can technically satisfy accessibility requirements and still create a frustrating experience for someone using it.
For instance, a form might have correctly labelled fields, but still contain a confusing sequence of questions. A website might be keyboard accessible, but require dozens of unnecessary key presses to complete a simple task. A video might have captions, but those captions may be inaccurate or poorly synchronized, many more.
Technical compliance and accessibility guidelines can tell us whether certain requirements have been met. But they do not always tell us whether the experience actually works for the person we are designing for.
And that distinction matters.
A product can technically meet accessibility requirements and still be difficult, confusing, or frustrating for someone to use. This is why accessibility cannot be addressed through guidelines and compliance alone. It also requires a connection with real users and an understanding of their experiences, needs, environments, and barriers through user research.
What is intelligent accessibility
Over the years those traditional accessibility frameworks have given us something incredibly valuable — a foundation for removing barriers. But much of these approaches assume that accessibility can be defined through relatively stable characteristics under,
- User needs
- Interface
- Set of accessibility requirements
- Particular context of use
In current process, we identify the barriers target group of users are facing, within those set of characteristics, design against them, and then test whether those barriers have been removed. This approach has been worked remarkably well for many static accessibility problems throughout the history. Therefore, it is not something we should ignore.
Artificial intelligence is changing how we think about accessibility, not by replacing human expertise, but by significantly expanding what is possible. AI can translate, summarize, describe, caption, and reorganize information faster than ever before. As AI reshapes how content is created and consumed, accessible, human-centered design must remain at the core of that evolution.
In AI augmented world, digital interfaces are changing as modern products are increasingly being dynamic, personalized, adaptive, multimodal, and context-aware. (Cao et al., 2025)<a href="https://medium.com/media/22aed53a0cd0595f79f600fbf8b7c397/href">https://medium.com/media/22aed53a0cd0595f79f600fbf8b7c397/href</a>
According to CMU’s Digital Accessibility Office views AI as a partner in advancing equity — a way to break down barriers, expand participation, and create multiple pathways to information. AI has the potential to provide humans with greater agency and autonomy, which is the fundamental aim of accessibility.
In systems facilitated by intelligent accessibility infrastructure, content can change based on user behavior. Interfaces can adapt to different screen sizes and respond to diverse user goals and tasks. Recommendation systems can personalize the information we receive, while AI-powered systems can generate content, summarize information, recognize speech, describe images, and modify interactions in real time.
The core idea behind all these approaches is the recognition that people and context are not always static. A person’s needs can change depending on their abilities, environment, activity, goals, and circumstances at a particular moment. What works well for someone in one situation may not necessarily work as well in another.
Who they are > what they are doing > where they are > what technology they are using > and what is happening around them
As we move toward answering the first question I posed at the beginning of this article, the ideas and arguments bring us to the conclusion - digital solutions are increasingly being capable of adapting to how people experience the world. (Hurst et al., 2011)
Therefore, the next step in accessibility is to explore interfaces that can recognize dynamic barriers, understand context, and adapt to people’s changing needs. These interfaces are called ‘Intelligent Interfaces’. It reshape the way we think about accessibility — not by replacing human expertise, but by expanding what is possible with new technologies.
For instance, AI can translate, summarize, describe, caption, reorganize, and interpret information at a scale and speed that was previously difficult to achieve. As AI continues to reshape how content is created, delivered, and consumed, it also creates new possibilities for designing experiences that can respond more dynamically to people and their circumstances.
The term ‘Intelligent Accessibility’ is a way of thinking about accessibility not as something designed into an interface once, asking users to adapt to it, but as something that can continuously respond to the person, their environment, and their context of use.
In this view, accessibility becomes less about providing a fixed set of accommodations to a set of defined users, but more about creating experiences capable of adapting when the conditions of interaction change.
What makes accessibility ‘intelligent’
Traditional accessibility often depends on human-defined rules and predefined solutions for anticipated scenarios. For example, a developer may manually provide alternative text for an image, define semantic structures, or specify how an interface should behave with keyboard navigation.
Whereas, intelligent accessibility introduces another layer: systems that can learn from data, interpret inputs, and adapt their behavior to changing circumstances. Technologies such as machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing can potentially help systems understand content, recognize patterns, interpret context, and provide assistance that is more responsive to an individual’s needs.
Today, standards such as WCAG provide important guidelines for designing accessible digital experiences, while automated accessibility testing can identify issues such as missing labels, insufficient color contrast, or missing alternative text. However, automated testing has limitations. It cannot fully determine whether an interface is understandable, usable in context, or actually works for a particular person. The UK Intelligence Community Design System, for example, notes that automated testing cannot identify every accessibility issue and that human evaluation remains necessary.
So, what happens in the space between what automated tools can detect and what people actually experience?
Perhaps this is where intelligent technologies can contribute.
Rather than replacing accessibility standards, user research, or human evaluation, AI could potentially complement them by helping systems respond to situations that predefined rules cannot anticipate.
However, this also raises an important question:
“Does making an accessibility system more intelligent necessarily make the experience more accessible?”
The answer cannot simply be yes. It has its own strengths and weaknesses.
Not every accessibility problem can — or should — be solved by embedding AI. Intelligent systems introduce their own technological, ethical, social, privacy, and experience-related challenges. An AI system can misinterpret a situation, make an inappropriate prediction, introduce new barriers, or require access to sensitive personal information.
Therefore, the goal should not be to add AI to accessibility for the sake of making it ‘intelligent’. Instead, the more meaningful question is of us experience designers can ask is:
How can intelligence be used responsibly to make accessibility more adaptive, contextual, and responsive to human needs?
The 4 elements that define ‘intelligence’ in accessibility
In this section, we explore what it means to make a product or a system intelligent from an accessibility. While reviewing foundational research in this domain and seeking to answer the question posed in this subsection, four key elements emerged from the literature that helped shape my understanding of ‘Intelligent’ Accessibility. They are:
An infographic illustrating four elements that define intelligence in accessibility from an Experience Design perspective — context awareness, real-time personalization, pattern recognition, and predictive automation. AI generated image using google flow.These should not be understood as a universally established four-part academic framework. Rather, they are my synthesis of capabilities emerging across research into AI-driven accessibility, adaptive interfaces, assistive technologies, and intelligent environments.
01. Context awareness
Traditional accessibility tools often depend on information that has already been defined by the designer or developer, such as labels, headings, alternative text, semantic structure, and other accessibility metadata.
Intelligent accessibility introduces another layer — understanding the meaning behind what is happening.
For example, a traditional image description might identify an object as ‘a woman’ or ‘a birthday cake.’ A context-aware AI system could potentially go further by interpreting the relationship between these elements and describing the scene as ‘A woman laughing while holding a birthday cake in a dimly lit room.’ The difference is subtle but important: the system is not simply identifying individual elements; it is interpreting them in relation to one another and the surrounding context.
Recent research demonstrates how AI can contribute to this shift. For example, ChartAccessMobile uses computer vision and large language models to analyze charts directly from mobile application interfaces. Rather than simply reading individual text elements, the system identifies charts, extracts their structure and data, generates summaries, and enables users to explore information at different levels of detail. Importantly, the system was evaluated with 10 visually impaired participants, whose feedback highlighted the need to support both high-level understanding and access to specific data within charts (Zhu et al., 2026).
02. Real-time personalization
Most accessibility features today are still largely user-configured. Users may need to enter settings, select larger text, increase contrast, change interaction preferences, activate captions, or choose an assistive technology. These options are valuable, but they generally assume that users already know what they need and are able and willing to configure the system accordingly.
Intelligent accessibility introduces another possibility: the interface itself can respond to changes in the user and their circumstances. Instead of relying entirely on predefined settings, an intelligent system could p