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• Rhetoric vs Responsibility: How Tech Companies Shape AI for Accessibility

  Aparajita S Marathe, Quan Zhou, Achi Mishra, Anne Marie Piper · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Marathe, Zhou, Mishra, and Piper conduct a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of 126 public-facing blog posts and news articles published between 2016 and 2025 by 11 leading U.S.-based AI companies — Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Eleven Labs, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI,…

  artificial intelligence · AI accessibility · critical discourse analysis · disability justice · critical disability studies

• Shiny Stories, Hidden Struggles: Investigating the Representation of Disability Through the Lens of LLMs

  Marco Bombieri, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, Marco Rospocher · 2026 · ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology

  This paper investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) represent disability by comparing AI-generated social media posts with self-descriptions from real people with disabilities on Reddit. The study addresses a critical gap in bias research: while prior work has focused on…

  AI bias · large language models · disability representation · inspiration porn · toxic positivity

• Interface Support for Evaluating Disability Bias in AI-Generated Images

  Kelly Avery Mack, Lucy Jiang, Lotus Zhang, Leah Findlater · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Mack and colleagues investigate whether interface-level interventions can help users of generative text-to-image (T2I) tools recognise and avoid disability stereotypes in AI-generated images. The authors frame the work around a gap in AI safety: while model-side debiasing is an…

  AI bias · generative AI · text-to-image · disability representation · disability stereotypes

• The Fears, The Hopes, The Oscillations: A Critical Analysis of Tech Startups Targeting Autism

  Yihe Wang, Bhavani Seetharaman, Rosemary Steup, Norman Makoto Su, Kathryn E. Ringland · 2025 · ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper employs thematic and critical discourse analysis to examine the websites of 38 autism tech startups founded in the U.S. since 2012, investigating how these companies construct problems, users, and technological legitimacy through their marketing language. The autism…

  autism · disability representation · critical disability studies · marketing discourse · tech startups

• Examining and Mitigating Ability-bias in LLMs via Self-Reflection

  Neel Iyer, Akshita Jha, Alisha Pradhan · 2025 · Proceedings of the 22nd International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This short paper investigates ability bias in large language models — the tendency of LLMs to encode and perpetuate stereotypical or discriminatory associations about people with disabilities. Using the Bias Benchmarking Questionnaire (BBQ) dataset, the authors administered…

  ability bias · ableism · LLM bias · debiasing · AI fairness

• "I'm treating it kind of like a diary": Characterizing How Users with Disabilities Use AI Chatbots

  Kayla Mullen, Wenhan Xue, Manasa Kudumu · 2024 · Proceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2024)

  This study investigates how people with disabilities actually use LLM-based chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity in their daily lives. While previous research has focused primarily on identifying harms that LLMs impose on the disability community — such as…

  large language models · AI chatbots · disability representation · disability justice · assistive AI

• How the Alt Text Gets Made: What Roles and Processes of Alt Text Creation Can Teach Us About Inclusive Imagery

  Emory James Edwards, Kyle Lewis Polster, Isabel Tuason, Emily Blank, Michael Gilbert, Stacy Branham · 2023 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper investigates how alternative text is created in industry settings through a collaboration between UC Irvine researchers and Google's Avatar Project, an initiative to create inclusive stickers depicting people with disabilities. The research combines two studies: focus…

  alt text · image accessibility · inclusive imagery · disability representation · organizational practices

• "That's in the eye of the beholder": Layers of Interpretation in Image Descriptions for Fictional Representations of People with Disabilities

  Emory James Edwards, Kyle Lewis Polster, Isabel Tuason, Emily Blank, Michael Gilbert, Stacy Branham · 2021 · Proceedings of the 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '21)

  This paper investigates how to create accurate and sensitive image descriptions for fictional representations of people with disabilities — a challenge that arises when real subjects cannot be consulted about their preferred identity terminology. The study emerged from Google's…

  image accessibility · alt text · image descriptions · disability representation · design systems

• Unintended Machine Learning Biases as Social Barriers for Persons with Disabilities

  Ben Hutchinson, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Remi Denton, Kellie Webster, Yu Zhong, Stephen Denuyl · 2020 · SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing

  This paper from Google's Ethical AI team provides concrete empirical evidence that widely deployed NLP models encode measurable biases against people with disabilities, creating social barriers through technology. The authors examine three layers of bias using a perturbation…

  machine learning bias · NLP · toxicity detection · sentiment analysis · disability representation

• A Return to Community: Flintstones or Jetsons?

  Vivienne Conway · 2020 · Proceedings of the 17th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This keynote-style paper uses the cultural lens of two iconic 1960s cartoons — The Flintstones and The Jetsons — to reflect on how automation and technology are shaping the lives of people with disabilities. Dr. Conway, writing from Western Australia during the early days of the…

  digital accessibility · automation · assistive technology · disability representation · home automation

10 results.