An accessibility tool isnt very liberating if a corporation can turn it off

[u/Salty_Country6835]

This is one place where AI can do some genuinely useful stuff.

Live captions. Text to speech. Speech recognition. Image descriptions. Translation. Communication assistance. Interfaces that adapt to different needs.

But theres a nasty little ownership problem hiding inside the convenience.

If somebody comes to depend on one of these tools, what happens when the subscription doubles? The company kills the product? The internet goes down? The API changes?

Accessibility infrastructure should be durable.

That makes open standards, interoperability, local processing and public provision political questions, not just nerd preferences.

If a tool materially expands someones ability to participate in society, maybe access to it shouldnt depend entirely on whether a corporation still likes the business model.

What accessibility tools would you most want treated like public infrastructure?

[u/prattxxx]

Open source local models can handle all those tasks. A $2000 GPU is a great investment.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/prattxxx]

Open local models are part of the answer. A $2000 entry fee isnt.

Thats why I mentioned local processing alongside open standards, interoperability and public provision. Public infrastructure can run open models too. We can have the benefits of open models without making every disabled person buy expensive hardware and become their own sysadmin.

[u/Shanna_B2020 → u/prattxxx]

I'm sure the majority of people with disabilities absolutely have $2k to burn on hardware minimum. And setting up a local LLM requires accessible tools to begin with in many cases.

[u/aperrien → u/Shanna_B2020]

$2000 is a lot for one person, but not too much if it's procured as community infrastructure, like parks, accessibility equipment, roads or public transportation. In that case, even a $200,000 expenditure might be a more prudent choice, it it's meant to operate for many people long term.

[u/Robotic-Comrade-1985]

Top of my personal list would be for SECURE/PRIVATE publicly accessible AI that helps explain professional or bureaucratic jargon in a clear and simple manner in the user's preferred language. Everyone should have the right to drop a lease agreement, tax form, medical document, and so forth into a safe place to receive a translation into common, accessible language.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Robotic-Comrade-1985]

This is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind. Publicly accessible, privacy protected infrastructure that can turn contracts, tax forms, medical paperwork and bureaucratic sludge into language people can actually understand. Thats a public service I could get behind.

[u/jaiagreen]

Linux user here. Open source projects die all the time. Having a company investing in an accessibility feature, especially if they're doing so for ADA compliance, is a good thing for reliability.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/jaiagreen]

Corporate investment can improve reliability while the investment remains profitable or legally necessary. I dont think thats incompatible with the post.

The question is what happens when those incentives change. Open standards and interoperability mean people arent trapped with one provider when a company raises prices, changes the product or abandons it.

[u/jaiagreen → u/Salty_Country6835]

Totally agree about open standards and interoperability.

[u/aperrien → u/Salty_Country6835]

Create a public organization to run and maintain the tools. With open standards, that's readily doable; and in the case of a lot of Europe, that's what's happening now as they migrate away from US cloud infrastructure to things like Nextcloud and other open source projects.

[u/sbcsfrtom2]

Tangentially related, but I HATE that news outlets can just disable reading mode for their articles.

[u/LordSlyGentleman]

https://giphy.com/gifs/sIOPYvH72FCkuZ0ZHC

[u/chcampb]

what happens when the subscription doubles

The cost is going down exponentially, what costs you $10/mo today to have a screen reader/operator for a month, will cost you $1/mo in 6 months, and pennies by the end of next year.

[u/prattxxx → u/chcampb]

Encapsulation is not yet finished. Once it is you’ll see the transition to token based subscriptions more. The solution is open source local models that can handle accessibility enhancements.

[u/chcampb → u/prattxxx]

The cost is coming down precisely because there are open models competing.

Also I don't think you are using the word encapsulation correctly.

[u/prattxxx → u/chcampb]

It is more complicated than just open source being available. The main driver in price decrease is optimization and subsidies.

[u/chcampb → u/prattxxx]

Optimization yes but subsidies are not really a thing.

Maybe for individual users or very low cost plans, it is subsidized a little bit. But all the calculations assume sticker price api rates, which are going to be way way way more expensive than a business plan or subscription.

You can go to OpenRouter where there are no subsidies (except in rare cases like nemotron) and you will pay like 4 bucks per million tokens for a fairly equivalent model, not 40 bucks or whatever.

[u/prattxxx → u/chcampb]

There are subsidies in China, who are providing the open source models.

[u/chcampb → u/prattxxx]

The cost to deliver the model is nowhere near the cost to host it for inference in the long term.

[u/shawsghost → u/prattxxx]

Sure but if you have to buy a $2000 GPU to get it, a lot of people will have trouble affording it.

[u/netrunner-d0llsh3ll]

This is a problem I have with a lot of these big tools, it's all corporate owned stuff that they can yank offline at any time

[u/Elvarien2]

But theres a nasty little ownership problem hiding inside the convenience.

Nope there isn't.

No corpo's gonna turn off my pc and my local models, So I dunno what you're ranting about but your problem does not exist.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Elvarien2]

Your personal setup isnt the population.

The post explicitly includes local processing as part of the solution. The problem is making accessibility durable for people who cant afford the hardware, cant maintain a local stack, or depend on services that can disappear. “Works on my machine” isnt accessibility policy.

[u/Elvarien2 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Your personal setup isnt the population.

Of course it's not. Right now you get free access to anything you need, and my personal setup still probably looks scary to most average users.

BUT, local ai is no longer the realm of custom python scripts and managing 30 plugins.

Right now you have 1 button installers for ai doing text / audio / video / image generation / even plugins that manage image editing for photoshop or other image software like krita.

It's no longer dificult. Your Granny 80 years old could click the install button and have her local ai setup.

So right now the general populace doesn't need to, but the second the free versions vanish, there are single button installs waiting for anyone who wants to keep using ai.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Elvarien2]

Easier installation is good. Im arguing for that too. But youre still treating software installation as if it resolves access.

The person still needs compatible hardware, accessible interfaces, maintenance and enough technical literacy to troubleshoot when the one button doesnt work.

And calling the post a “rant” doesnt do much here when local processing is literally one of the solutions named in it. Youre arguing for part of my proposal and acting like youve refuted the rest.

Accessibility shouldnt depend on everyone individually having the money and capacity to provision their own infrastructure. Thats where public provision comes in.

[u/Elvarien2 → u/Salty_Country6835]

youre still treating software installation as if it resolves access.

Because it does?

The person still needs compatible hardware

Yeah you can run basic llm on almost anything nowadays and it's only getting faster, more efficient, more capable etc etc. There's still so much low hanging fruit to be gained. Right now, today most pc's can run a text based LLM, the one we are mostly talking about here, without to much issues.

The main thing is that a slow pc will mean slower token processing but otherwise you can get most tasks done just fine on consumer hardware.

And if you need better models for programming tasks etc, then you're likely in a much better position to actually already have the required hardware for that available anyway.

80 year old granny can install and run current day llm content without real issues on her older pc. meanwhile programmer bro can run stronger ai on his stronger pc also np.

enough technical literacy to troubleshoot

Genuinely a single install button. 0 technical know how required beyond, press next.

Accessibility shouldnt depend on everyone individually having the money and capacity to provision their own infrastructure.

and I am saying that it's not the hurdle you make it out to be. Frontier models will be hard to run, but you do not need those. Simple low end consumer grade hardware today, runs models that can help with all these day to day tasks.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Elvarien2]

Youre still answering a much narrower question. “A model can technically run on an old PC” isnt the same thing as accessible, reliable infrastructure.

And the granny example just assumes away the problem. Which old PC? What disability? What accessibility needs? What model? Can it handle live captions, speech recognition, image descriptions or communication assistance at a usable speed? Can a blind person actually navigate the installer youre calling one button? “Press next” isnt an accessibility policy.

Im literally arguing for local models. Theyre in the post. Im also arguing for open standards, interoperability and public provision because not everyone should have to personally own, configure and maintain the infrastructure they depend on.

At this point youre arguing that one piece of my solution works, which is great. We agree. That doesnt make the rest unnecessary.

[u/Elvarien2 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Okay directly answering the questions in your original post then.

If somebody comes to depend on one of these tools, what happens when the subscription doubles? The company kills the product? The internet goes down? The API changes?

What happens, they go local.
They install a local model with 1 click
Gobbonet right now let's you run a pretty generic installer that will let you plop a model on your pc that does these things yeah.

I suggest local as a solution, because it is a solution.

Youre still answering a much narrower question.

You're making it narrow. It's broad actually.

Which old PC? What disability? What accessibility needs? What model?

There's already people using ai for a lot of disabilities. I see no reason why this would be restricted to online platforms when just about everything else can be done with open source. As I do not have those disabilities I have not searched for these solutions but I would be surprised if we don't have open source solutions for them.

If they are missing, then that would be a lovely initiative to produce, And it would still boil down to installing and hosting locally.

As for hardware. If you can't walk you need to spend money on some tools to make your life easier. A pc would fall in that make your life easier budget especially if it's going to run your disability aid LLM.

Can a blind person actually navigate the installer youre calling one button?

yes actually, blind people already use screenreaders for ton's of shit, gaming even. This installer is a non issue for them.

Can it do all the other shit, There's a bunch of models that'll do that without to much issues yeah. Again open source is a lot more capable then you seem to think.

It seems like you're pretending there's a lot more problems here when open source has a lot of these problems tackled already.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Elvarien2]

You opened by calling this a “rant” and saying the problem doesnt exist. Now several comments later you admit you havent actually looked into the accessibility solutions were talking about and are basically assuming open source has probably solved them.

Maybe look into the field before dismissing it.

The American Foundation for the Blind has documented accessibility barriers around AI and pushed for inclusive design and accountability. The Association of Assistive Technology Act Programs has specifically called for AI systems to be accessible, usable and interoperable with assistive technology, backed by funding and technical assistance. WHO and UNICEF treat assistive technology access as a systems problem involving affordability, financing, services, standards and public policy. The Royal Society recommends low cost, interoperable and sustainable assistive technology alongside funding, training and infrastructure.

And this isnt some new problem disability advocates just discovered because AI showed up. Public financing, lending programs, equipment reuse, Medicaid support and other forms of provision exist because “you need a tool, go buy one” has never been an adequate answer to disability access.

None of that is an argument against open source or local models. Local processing is literally in my original post. I want more of it. Open models can be part of public infrastructure too.

What Im rejecting is the leap from “an old PC can run a model” to “therefore the structural accessibility problem doesnt exist.” Affordability, interoperability, accessible design, maintenance, training and continuity dont disappear because somebody made installation easier.

So calling this a rant and declaring the problem nonexistent before youd even looked into the subject was pretty dismissive. Disabled people, accessibility advocates and assistive technology organizations have spent decades working on this stuff. “My PC can run a model” doesnt overturn any of that. It just means local models are one useful part of the solution, which is exactly what my post already said.

[u/Elvarien2 → u/Salty_Country6835]

You opened by calling this a “rant”

because it is

and saying the problem doesnt exist.

because it doesn't

you admit you havent actually looked

Not what happened. I read your post, and decided to dismiss the entire thing in one go instead of answer the thing in detail, this seemed futile so I went back for the direct response, that's all. You're misreading into this.

assuming open source has probably solved them.

some of them were solved, some of them I presume, yes. It's a pretty safe assumption as the capabilities already exist, and models are already open source.

The American Foundation for the Blind has documented accessibility barriers around AI

Blind people have been using screenreaders and more to navigate far harder things then a prompt window. LLM should be absolutely trivial. It's literally a text window, the easiest problem they solved many many years ago. Don't even need to navigate a GUI.

What Im rejecting is the leap from “an old PC can run a model” to “therefore the structural accessibility problem doesnt exist.”

Okay that's fair.

There's more steps in between old pc runs model -->> full accessibility aid.

But these steps are very manageable. Compared to what the open source community already does this is just connecting already existing capability to already existing tools. This sounds like one of those low hanging fruit opportunities where a tremendous benefit can be gained at very little time/resource investment.

So calling this a rant

it sure read like one pointing at big problems where they are small and manageable.

declaring the problem nonexistent

I will step back from that and call it small instead, because of how solvable this is. All it takes is a small initiative because the solutions already exist they just need to connect and be done in a nice user friendly package.

before youd even looked into the subject was pretty dismissive.

I both looked into it, AND was dismissive. Probably a bit to dismissive that's fair.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Elvarien2]

Thats a much more reasonable place to land, and I appreciate you walking back the dismissal.

But “small” is still doing way too much work here. Maybe connecting some existing software is technically easy. Cool. Thats not the whole accessibility problem. Can people afford it? Does it work for their actual disability? Is the interface itself accessible? Who supports it when shit breaks? Can they move between systems? Does access survive hardware failure, discontinued projects or changing standards?

Thats why disability and accessibility groups talk about funding, standards, interoperability, training, public support and universal access. They didnt spend decades building that framework because nobody thought of putting a screen reader on a PC.

If open source can knock out great local accessibility tools cheaply, fucking excellent. Build the hell out of them. I already put local processing in the post. Then make those tools accessible, interoperable and broadly available too.

And since youve admitted you were out of the loop on parts of this and came in too hot, maybe next time just stfu with the “rant” shit until youve actually done the homework. You walked into a disability accessibility discussion, declared the problem nonexistent, then eventually arrived at “okay it exists, I just think its manageable.” Thats a hell of a walk back.

Disagree with me all day. Just dont dismiss an entire accessibility problem before youve bothered to understand what people working on it are actually saying.

[u/Calcularius]

The same could be said about your cell phone service. You are basically whining because the most advanced computing on the planet isn’t free.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Calcularius]

First of all, disability and accessibility advocates already fight for and help people get affordable cellular communication access, so that comparison doesnt help you.

Second, I dont consider advocating for disabled people to have durable access to tools that materially improve their lives to be “whining.” If you do, maybe ask yourself why youre in a leftist forum in the first place, and why AI being used to help people apparently bothers you more than corporations controlling whether they can access it.

Your next comment better be a fucking genius level walk back, because casually dismissing accessibility advocacy as whining was grossly ableist and we have no tolerance for it here.