Everyone is doing something with AI right now.
Most cannot tell you what. But they're doing it. Token spend go up and to the right. Up and to the right is always good, isn't it?!
They're doing it because not doing it is scarier than doing it badly.
Meanwhile, products are still unusable if you use a keyboard. The error messages still read like they were written by a robot. Shit, maybe they were! Colour contrast is still something someone raised last week in a Slack thread that went quiet the very next day.
AI is a story. And an exciting one at that. Accessibility is not. So one gets a budget, a task force and a bunch of LinkedIn posts. The other gets a ticket in a backlog nobody will ever look at.
What I hate is that AI could actually help here. Clearer language. Smarter error handling. Rewriting error messages so that they don't read "Error 403: Unexpected error." Simplifying legal copy and terms into something a person can read. Flagging when form labels are vague or missing. Describing charts and data visualisations.
The tools exist.
But we're not using AI to fix anything. We're using it to sound like we're not behind.