According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate among people with disabilities was 10.1 percent in 2021, about twice the rate of people without disabilities. In New Zealand, only about 44 percent of working-age adults with disabilities were participants in the labor force, contrasted with a figure close to 85 percent for people without disabilities.
Even when employed, people with disabilities earn less, work fewer hours, and have less personal wealth than their counterparts without disabilities. For the estimated 2.5 billion people with disabilities worldwide who will need assistive technologies within the next decade, there are still substantial barriers to successful, productive employment.
But now, artificial intelligence is starting to chip away at those barriers, making it possible for organizations to achieve meaningful levels of inclusivity that benefit everyone. Today’s AI systems are rapidly gaining in sophistication. Many can now assist individuals with physical or cognitive disabilities with a wide range of simple and complex tasks at work.
Communication Barriers
For people who need help with communication, existing AI systems can help. One example: In 2020, Amazon announced a collaboration with start-up VoiceItt to give its Alexa voice assistant the ability to recognize atypical human speech. VoiceItt was founded with the goal of helping people with speech impairments due to developmental disability, stroke, or a neurodegenerative condition. The company built a voice database of the speech of real people with atypical speech patterns to inform its machine learning platform. The company notes that its speech-recognition capabilities also extend to non-standard accents.
Google’s engineers developed the Parrotron app as a means of helping people with atypical speech engage in meaningful give-and-take conversations. This end-to-end-trained model converts non-standard speech directly into speech easily understood by another human, without any intermediary translation to text. The company says the principles behind the app can adapt to recognize the very atypical speech of some Deaf and hard of hearing speakers.
Hearing-impaired employees will benefit from AI applications that transcribe oral speech to text, making participation in real-time conversations more fluid and accessible. Analogous AI systems can translate text to speech. They can read text aloud or provide image descriptions to people with blindness or low vision.
Enhancing Professional Development
Every company that wants to stay competitive knows it needs to provide a variety of high-quality training and professional development opportunities. For employees with disabilities, however, numerous obstacles often make professional development a frustrating experience. Augmented reality or virtual reality—collectively known as XR systems—can make trainings more interactive, and thus more meaningful, to employees with disabilities or learning differences.
XR can provide a safe, private virtual space for employees to practice new technical, communication, or interpersonal skills free from observation or judgment. XR systems can also be simulation environments for employees to practice interviews as a first step toward promotion. These systems can also provide feedback for the employee or employer, noting and supporting specific areas for improvement and helping build personalized skill-enhancement plans.
Organizing the Workplace Experience
Voice-responsive virtual assistants are available from several developers, and they can help employees with visual, speech, or processing disabilities. A virtual assistant capable of recognizing human behavior patterns can help people with a range of speech and cognitive abilities stay organized. For example, it can provide prompts to help navigate complex tasks or conversations, remember appointments and meetings, and follow the intricate email threads that are anxiety inducing for anyone.
Visually impaired employees may also find an interface with higher-than-standard contrast helpful. Additionally, plug-in fonts can alter written text to make it more accessible to people with dyslexia.
Expanding Capabilities
Generative AI chatbots draw on large universes of data to assemble original texts, images, or graphics in response to prompts. They have opened new paths to creativity and productivity for people with disabilities. People with disabilities have pointed out that generative AI can become a “copilot,” offering insights into tasks that involve gathering, interpreting, and reassembling information.
Thanks to voice-enabled and voice-to-text and text-to-voice capabilities, people with a variety of motor or neurological disabilities can give prompts directly to chatbots and access the products of these interactions in real time.
A New Era of Inclusivity
All these tools can improve the workplace experiences of millions of people with disabilities, enabling them to add to their skills, share ideas, participate, and collaborate more fully with internal and external customers. Using AI systems to assist employees with disabilities makes it easier for companies to achieve regulatory compliance. Beyond legal necessity, AI applications that assist employees with disabilities can help reduce employee turnover, increase loyalty and improve morale, and enhance their brands.
Experts note that it’s imperative that developers include people with disabilities in the design and expansion of all types of AI systems. Their lived experiences will provide insights and actionable intelligence to make it easier to build inclusive AI systems right the first time, rather than putting them through expensive retrofitting after the fact.
Inclusive participation will also ensure that emerging applications will be more responsive and user-friendly for people without disabilities as well.