Technology and artificial intelligence are not only transforming various industries, but also creating new opportunities for inclusion and empowerment for people with disabilities. According to the World Health Organization, more than one billion people live with some form of disability, and they often face barriers to access information, education, employment, health care, and social services. Technology can play a vital role in bridging these gaps and enhancing the quality of life for people with disabilities. In particular AI can offer innovative solutions to overcome some of the challenges and limitations that people with disabilities face in their daily lives. Therefore, it is important to involve people with disabilities in the design, development, and evaluation of AI applications, and to ensure that AI is aligned with the principles of human rights, dignity, and diversity.
Technology and AI can help people with disabilities in various ways, such as:
- Assistive technology: Providing AI-powered tools such as speech recognition, text-to-speech, computer vision, and natural language processing.
- Access to learning: Enabling accessible and personalized learning experiences that can adapt to the needs and preferences of learners with disabilities, such as adaptive curriculum, interactive feedback, and gamification.
- Communication tools: Facilitating better communications through tools such as chatbots, digital assistants, online platforms, and smart devices that can help empower people socially and on the job.
In our work at Microsoft, we have the honor of partnering with a variety of nonprofit organizations where technology and AI innovations are helping drive inclusion and productivity for those with disabilities.
Special Olympics International (SOI) is leveraging technology to help empower athletes. To build a digital athlete registration portal as part of its new Center of Excellence, the SOI technology team examined how SOI athletes and SOI employees with intellectual and developmental disabilities navigated different websites and external registration systems. To help athletes and employees register independently, the SOI team took the observations and feedback from their focus groups into consideration when creating a streamlined athlete registration portal and designed it to be easy to navigate. Simple adjustments such as reducing the options to click away, asking only one question at a time, gamifying the process by awarding medals for completing portions of the registration, and making it screen-reader compatible are helping ensure a more inclusive, productive experience for athletes to self-register and partake in the competition, community and fun.
Goodwill Industries of Orange County and its e-commerce platform Shopgoodwill.com are serving their communities by empowering people who want to work, no matter their station in life. Whether they’re a veteran returning to the workforce, a person with a mental health diagnosis, or someone with a physical or intellectual disability, Goodwill will help them find employment.
The Shopgoodwill.com e-commerce platform is using AI as a productivity tool for the process of photographing, identifying, and cataloging items to be sold on their website. Employees use smart devices with custom vision to capture imagery and classify the item, which then uses computer vision to extract information from elements such as the material label and merchandise tags that get fed into a large language model that helps catalog the item and ready it for sale. For employees with disabilities, this type of AI functionality is transformative. It can make the actual day-to-day of the job easier, expand the number of people who are able to fill these types of roles, and help drive increased revenue to fund the program.
Further recognizing the power or AI, Goodwill’s workforce development teams are in the beginning stages of leveraging AI to more accurately work with their employment program participants to put them into scenarios and working environments that will help them achieve their best by optimizing past performance capabilities with available jobs and pairing individuals with the right opportunities.
Digital technology and AI can create more inclusive and accessible solutions that can empower people with disabilities to achieve their goals and aspirations. We are proud to work with and support nonprofit organizations with technology that enables greater accessibility to help create a more inclusive and equitable world.
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For more information about Microsoft responsible AI principles, read more here: Empowering responsible AI practices | Microsoft AI. If you are interested in making your content more inclusive and user-friendly with Microsoft Accessibility tools, we have a variety of resources available.
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