There’s a saying: A picture tells more than a thousand words. This is even more important for people with disabilities. I am going to explain how imagery in your application can increase accessibility and inclusion for people with difficulties with intelligence, autism and people with different cultural backgrounds. As the Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit states: the disability spectrum is more than permanent conditions. A person coming from a different culture may not understand our language completely, then there is a mismatch between what they need to do and are able to do. The same is for everyone traveling to another culture. Last visit to a kebab bar proved again that visual aids helped me to order the right dish!
People with learning difficulties like down syndrome, dyslexia, and others may benefit greatly from visual representations. These aids can enhance understanding, even more: a picture can be the difference between understanding or not understanding at all and being left behind. I encourage the use of visual aids in your application. This can be done by using icons, images and more. This will even help people with autism, as they often have a strong preference for visual information to help the to build their predictive model of the world (your products and services).
So far, so good, let’s bring in Generative AI! Last weeks there was a whirlwind of discussions if we should generate images with AI. Is it ethical? Is it too much energy consuming? Can we all just generate our Ghibli without consequences? Is it even helpful and useful at all? Well, I am here to say it is helpful in some cases. Sometimes it is a great way of providing tangible imagery to help people to understand some concepts. You even say: sometimes it’s more ethical to generate an image than construct a situation than to take a real picture of. When building applications for mental health assistance (that also helps people with autism), having tangible imagery can bridge emotional gaps. If you want to build applications to assist people with stress, anxiety and emotional intelligence, generative AI can be used to mock up scenarios of stressful situations, bullying, topics that trigger anxiety and more. Let’s be honest, generating an image of a person that is being bullied is much more ethical than actually bullying someone to take a picture of it!
I wrap up with discussing the need to have also a textual alternative of the image (ex: ALT-text) to help people that are using screencreaders (ex: people with vision loss). An accessible world means and-and. And images and text. I hope you enjoy this whirlwind of inspiration about images as an accessibility assistant. Maybe you might change your mind about using generative AI to create images.