Deaf and Hard of Hearing Access to Intelligent Personal Assistants: Comparison of Voice-Based Options with an LLM-Powered Touch Interface

We investigate intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people who can use their voice in everyday communication. The inability of IPAs to understand diverse accents including deaf speech renders them largely inaccessible to non-signing and speaking DHH individuals. Using an Echo Show, we compare the usability of natural language input via spoken English; with Alexa's automatic speech recognition and a Wizard-of-Oz setting with a trained facilitator re-speaking commands against that of a large language model (LLM)-assisted touch interface in a mixed-methods study. The touch method was navigated through an LLM-powered "task prompter," which integrated the user's history and smart environment to suggest contextually-appropriate commands. Quantitative results showed no significant differences across both spoken English conditions vs LLM-assisted touch. Qualitative results showed variability in opinions on the usability of each method. Ultimately, it will be necessary to have robust deaf-accented speech recognized natively by IPAs.

Accessibility Considerations in the Development of an AI Action Plan

We argue that there is a need for Accessibility to be represented in several important domains: - Capitalize on the new capabilities AI provides - Support for open source development of AI, which can allow disabled and disability focused professionals to contribute, including - Development of Accessibility Apps which help realise the promise of AI in accessibility domains - Open Source Model Development and Validation to ensure that accessibility concerns are addressed in these algorithms - Data Augmentation to include accessibility in data sets used to train models - Accessible Interfaces that allow disabled people to use any AI app, and to validate its outputs - Dedicated Functionality and Libraries that can make it easy to integrate AI support into a variety of settings and apps. - Data security and privacy and privacy risks including data collected by AI based accessibility technologies; and the possibility of disability disclosure. - Disability-specific AI risks and biases including both direct bias (during AI use by the disabled person) and indirect bias (when AI is used by someone else on data relating to a disabled person).