I wonder if companies have a hard time making a sale today unless their pitch is heavily centered around AI.
People are in awe that clicking a button will spin for a few seconds and then spit out a few paragraphs of text, suggest next steps and then ask them whether they want to do that. The button doesn't even have to be useful or the output believable. If it has that little sparkle as an icon (by the way, when did we decide that's the official icon for AI?!), people already start to tremble with excitement.
AI demos crave applause while the world just needs fewer broken forms.
I think the best use case for AI in accessibility will bore you to tears.
I just want it to check labels, rewrite error messages, fix vague links, describe charts and maybe flag focus order problems. None of that will make for a good demo. It certainly won't sell products.
Boring!
I like boring. Boring is good. Boring means shipping good, quality software that everyone can use.
Boring usually looks small. Boring is when things work with a keyboard. A password reset email written in plain English is boring. That form that doesn't make a screen reader announce "edit text blank" 14 times is boring.
AI doesn't need to be this magic accessibility machine. I just need it to sit inside product work where teams already create a mess.
If you're using AI at your company, before you release something today, ask it one boring question:
What in this flow would make it harder for someone using only a keyboard to use?
Then fix that.