Business

How Artificial Intelligence is Empowering Workplace Accessibility

By enhancing accessibility, supporting communication and offering personalized support, AI-powered technologies are making the workplace more inclusive for people with disabilities.

February 19, 2025

It’s late July 2024. As she’s done countless times before, Democratic Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton of Virginia steps up to speak on the floor of the House of Representatives. But this time is different. When she recently was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder impairing her ability to speak, Wexton feared that her voice was gone forever. As she stands at the lectern, however, her remarks echo clearly through the chamber of the U.S. Capitol.

“It was a special moment that I never imagined could happen,” Wexton told The Associated Press after her speech.

Wexton owes her oral comeback to artificial intelligence — specifically, an AI-generated model of her own voice. And she’s not alone. Her speech at the Capitol marked not only an important moment in Congressional history, but also a potential turning point for people with disabilities in the workplace.

AI, powered by cloud computing, is empowering individuals with a wide range of disabilities by making work more accessible, courtesy of tools like voice-activated electronics; supporting communication, as it did for the Congresswoman; and offering personalized support, such as monitoring health changes or acting as a personal assistant.

“I think it’s going to make vocational and leisure activities a lot more successful for individuals with disabilities,” said Clarion Mendes, professor of speech and hearing science at the University of Illinois.

Technological Empowerment

Mendes works on the Speech Accessibility Project, a research initiative supported by the likes of Apple, Google and Meta that ensures voice recognition technology is useful for people with disabilities.

“Speech recognition technology has gotten really precise in the past few years for individuals who don’t have any sort of communication impairment, but the progress has not kept up for individuals that have communication impairments,” Mendes said. “We at the university are collecting the shared voices of individuals with ALS, Parkinson’s disease, down syndrome, individuals who’ve had strokes and individuals with cerebral palsy, and we now have over 1,200 participants.”

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Because speech recognition is powered by machine learning, its performance hinges on high-quality and diverse training data, without which models can ingest only a limited spectrum of speech. With that in mind, the goal of Mendes’ project is collecting data that could more effectively train the behemoth machine learning algorithms behind voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, which ultimately will make them more accessible to a wider range of users.

Consider a smart home that uses voice-activated commands to toggle lights on or off, or to alter the volume on a device. When people with disabilities can operate technology using just their voices, they can do a wider range of activities that might otherwise be impossible for them to do.

“Somebody that might be limited in dexterity may need to rely on their voice to help perform those activities of daily living,” Mendes said. “Many of those individuals may also have difficulties with intelligible speech. And so, by having apps that work for people with less intelligible speech, individuals can make the things around them work for them so much better.”

Creating New Opportunities

As many as 70% of people with disabilities are unemployed in industrialized nations, according to the United Nations. Although many of those people want to work, they often struggle to find jobs where they can be successful.

Fortunately, technology that can empower people with disabilities in the home also can empower them in the workplace.

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“Most professions do rely very heavily on communication and verbal communication in particular,” Mendes said. 

“If a person has less intelligible speech, but can have an app or something that helps to translate or convey their message more successfully, it becomes a really big deal. I’ve talked to several individuals who are extremely well educated that have a very hard time finding employment because their communication gets in the way. If these apps can be successful for them, the vocational doors just burst wide open.”

Because diversity is a crucial ingredient for companies seeking a strategic advantage over competitors, making work more accessible for people with disabilities is as beneficial to employers as it is to employees.

Case in point: Companies like Mentra, which is using AI to match neurodivergent jobseekers — people with differences in cognition and perception, including those with autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — with job opportunities that suit their talents.

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Equally AI is another company that’s using machine learning to create accessibility features at work. With the help of AI, its platform automates accessibility enhancements for websites to make them better suited for users with mental disabilities, visual impairments and dexterity challenges that make it difficult to operate a mouse.

“Our technology helps businesses make it much easier for them to make their websites accessible,” said Equally AI CEO Ran Ronen.

Still other examples include:

  • Be My Eyes connects blind individuals who need sighted assistance with volunteers. It’s now employing AI to take the place of human helpers, using it to identify, describe and contextualize for users everything that’s visible to their mobile device through its camera. It’s similar to what Hollywood has been doing for visually impaired audiences with audio descriptions in television and film, but in the context of the everyday world, which further expands opportunities for the visually impaired at home and in the office.

  • Tatum Robotics is advancing accessibility in the workplace for deaf-blind people through the combination of AI and robotics. Its unique solution — which is an alternative to traditional braille — ingests live text or voice input from mainstream media, then translates it into American Sign Language using a flexible robotic hand.

  • Parrots has created an AI device that improves lives and could potentially save them by enabling timelier social and medical interventions. The device affixes to a wheelchair in order to provide wheelchair users with real-time assistance, remote patient monitoring and even telehealth access.

  • Inclusive Brains is developing a tool that harnesses the power of generative AI to translate brainwaves, body language and eye movements into digital actions. As a result, those with limited mobility can operate all types of devices without having to use their hands or voices — which could make the digital world vastly more inclusive and accessible while also expanding opportunities in the workplace.

Because their products require vast amounts of computing power and impossibly large data sets, the heart of these and other companies is cloud computing.

“We use AWS cloud for building all of the structure, for doing all the scanning, and for making the decisions on what to do and what not to do,” Ronen said.

The only thing more impressive than the infrastructure that enables AI-based accessibility in the workplace is the social and economic impact it can have: For all the talk about how AI could displace workers, AI-based accessibility features at work illustrate how it also could help empower them.

Concluded Ronen, “Helping people with disabilities is at our core.”

Chase Guttman is a technology writer. He’s also an award-winning travel photographer, Emmy-winning drone cinematographer, author, lecturer and instructor. His book, The Handbook of Drone Photography, was one of the first written on the topic and received critical acclaim. Find him at chaseguttman.com or @chaseguttman.

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