Disabled citizens and the future of AI
This article discusses the potential for AI to empower disabled citizens while highlighting the lack of inclusive design in current deployments. It argues that India must enforce mandatory accessibility standards to ensure that AI-driven government and private services do not exclude people with disabilities.
Why it matters
As AI becomes integrated into essential public services, ensuring accessibility is a matter of fundamental rights and social equity.
A friend of this author has been blind since birth. He uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) almost every day — to read a document; to make sense of a photograph; or to get through a government form his screen reader cannot open, all without relying on a sighted person for help. Watching what it gives him, independence in the small things most people never have to think twice about, the promise of this technology is impossible to dismiss. At the same time, it is impossible to assume that this promise will reach disabled Indians on its own. AI models are moving into government services, recruitment and healthcare. Behind them, data centres and power lines are rising as the Centre courts $200 billion in AI investment for the next two years.
Disabled people are being brought into the conversation late, if at all.
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