Antonia Fedder is a digital designer, consultant, and speaker working at the intersection of accessibility, inclusion, and sustainability. She is also a CMS Critic contributor. AI is either the greatest opportunity for the future of digital accessibility or a fast track to cementing existing exclusions. It all depends on who you ask. I honestly think both are happening at the same time, and the decisions that are being made right now will determine where we end up. The disability market remains both chronically underserved and one of the most severely underestimated in the world, and that’s before you consider the much bigger community of people who use the digital world differently: neurodivergent users, senior citizens, people with temporary impairments, anyone who’s ever encountered a digital interface that wasn’t built for them. Getting AI and accessibility right is a market question, a rights question, and a design question. This is not a niche problem. Before we go further, we need to be clear about what we’re actually talking about. "AI" covers a lot of ground. Discriminative AI works through recognition and classification. That’s the technology behind speech recognition systems like Voiceitt, which learns the unique speech patterns of people with cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s, or Down syndrome, so that they can be understood by voice interfaces made only for standard speech. It supports Microsoft’s Seeing AI, which has enabled blind and low-vision users to manage millions of independent tasks using just a smartphone camera. Generative AI creates. Be My AI, built into the Be My Eyes app, goes beyond describing images. It enables actual conversations around them. You can ask follow-up questions and explore what you are seeing. Apple’s Personal Voice allows people living with ALS or other speech-affecting conditions to create a synthetic version of their own voice in 15 minutes