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This company touched AI for its website, and it went to court

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Automating the work of following these guidelines can make the web more welcoming. But more than 600 accessibility experts have signed up a document urging website operators not to use these automation tools, including AccessiBe. Signatories include W3C policy collaborators and employees from Microsoft, Apple and Google. “Automated access problem detection and repair is not reliable enough to fill a site,” the document says, accusing some vendors of “misleading marketing”.

The site was created by Karl Groves, founder of accessibility consultancy Tenon.io, and gave a terrific 35-page review of AccessiBe’s software to Murphy’s lawsuit against Eyebobs. Groves said he surveyed a total of about 1,000 pages of 50 websites using startup technology and found a median of 2,300 violations of W3C guidelines for each site. Groves says it’s a big contempt, as most of the guidelines can only be verified by expert manual analysis. “Artificial intelligence doesn’t work that way yet,” he says.

In a report on AccessiBe, Groves mentioned the image of a model wearing a white dress for sale at an e-commerce site. The alternative text given, apparently created by AccessiBe technology, was “Grass Nature and Summer”. In other cases, it has been reported that AccessiB has not successfully added labels to forms and buttons.

On the home page of its website, AccessiB promises “automated web accessibility”. But support documents warn customers that their machine learning technology may not be able to accurately interpret the features of web pages if “they haven’t found enough of these items before”.

AccessiBe’s head of community relations, Joshua Basile, says he has been more involved with disability advocacy groups since joining the company and clarified that he offers “manual repair” along with automatic repairs. “It’s an evolving technology and we’re getting better and better,” he says.

In a statement, AccessiBe’s head of marketing, Gil Magen, said the company had reviewed Eyebobs ’website and complied with accessibility standards. AccessiBe offers customer support for litigation, but Eyebobs has declined, the statement said.

In his statement, Eyebobs said AccessiB did not respond to requests for meetings with its lawyers and provided form responses “ensuring that we comply with our website.” Eyebobs is no longer working with AccessiBe, nor are we working in the future. “

Although there is no acknowledgment of the problems its site has had in the settlement of Eyebobs, which will end next year, the company is required to pay for an audit of external experts and dedicate one or more employees to accessibility work. “Eyebobs is committed to complying with the ADA and supporting all visitors to our website,” says marketing director Megan McMoInau.

Haben Girma, a lawyer for the rights of the deaf-blind, says the Eyebobs lawsuit hopes the company will recommend the use of AccessiBe or similar tools. He believes that technology companies or regulators like the US Federal Trade Commission should take action against the mis-marketing of accessibility tools. “Governments, Google and social media companies can stop the spread of misinformation,” he says.

Experts who are critical of automated accessibility tools generally do not argue that technology is completely invalid. Rather, they say putting too much trust in the software risks causing harm.

A The role of 2018 W3C staff praised the potential of using IA to help people with visual impairment or other needs, but warned of its limitations. As an example he pointed out a Facebook project that uses machine learning to create text descriptions of published images by users. The system won an award from the American Foundation for the Blind in 2017. But his descriptions can be difficult to interpret. Sassy Outwater-Wright, director of the Massachusetts Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, noted that the system sometimes expressed concern for body parts – “two people standing, beard, feet, outside, water” – calling it a “beard problem.” ”.

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