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Blaming accessibility tools for what people do with them is reactionary (beehaw.org)

submitted 2 months ago by rosethornRangerTTV@beehaw.org to c/politics@beehaw.org

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People can do shitty things with accessibility. I could use alt-text on images to figure out who I could call slurs when I might not be able to otherwise.

That is not an argument against accessibility. People can potentially use their access to society to do harm, but not having access is guaranteed harm. It is not just guaranteed harm though, it is specifically systematic harm against disabled people on the basis of being disabled. Doing hierarchy because some members of another group might potentially choose to do hierarchy themselves does not reduce hierarchy overall, it makes it much worse.

Anybody who blames the accessibility tools themselves is a reactionary. This includes what people do with stuff like AI. No matter how much you try you will never go back to some ideal past. The AI is not going away. Your choice is simply whether or not you do hierarchy.

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[–] luciole@beehaw.org 17 points 2 months ago

Hard disagree. Tools can absolutely be blamed or otherwise regulated on account of their affordances. You're very close to the "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument.

I struggle with the framing of generative AI as an a11y tool as well. I understand that it may serve this purpose, but it's much more than that. Generative AI deserves scrutiny for being such a powerful disinformation tool, for driving massive power consumption and for perpetuating harmful biases.

Also I don't see what you're trying to achieve preemptively calling anyone who disagrees a reactionary... Look, you've been posting a lot of hot takes daily for a while now and I feel like maybe you'd profit from reading and reflecting on things, take time to dig into stuff? Right now you're just asserting one thing after another as fact with little to support any of it.