ActualIdiocy or Artificial Intelligence
Is AI a Friend or Foe?
By Jim House for WASILC
AI is a rapidly growing field. Too many people just type a few prompts and expect great results without further checking for accuracy. More productivity? Not really. It is more do-overs. I base this on my experience as a deaf person who spent many years advocating for accessible information and communication technology. While I am not an engineer nor a designer, I do see things with an end-user viewpoint using accessibility lens.
When I was growing up, I often visited my grandparents out on the family farm. Being left out of conversations by family members who do not sign, I retreated to my grandfather’s workshop where he kept stacks of old Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines from the 50s and 60s. They were full of articles by writers dreaming of futuristic technology such as space travel and flying cars. Those articles fed me with a vivid imagination of what is possible now, what could be possible five years from now, and even far into the future more than 10 years from now or 50 years from now! My young brain had been working overtime on just the accessibility features that should have been included in the technology of the day but wasn’t. Was it because of intentional oversight or ignorance? In most cases, the technology had not matured enough to allow for additional features that were only possible with digital technology.
Films are one example. Before video, when we were watching movies at school in the classroom, captioning was not an common option. The films we used were mostly 16 millimeters wide shown at around 30 frames per second. They were fragile and had to be threaded manually through the projector. The worse mishap I have had was when someone walking by in the dark knocked the reels out of alignment causing sprockets to tear into the film and then the hot bulb for the light melted the film because it got stuck. We had to be gentle with how we handled the film before, during, and after the show. Later, the projectors were able to thread the film automatically, and I thought that was the coolest thing. But accessibility? Still not happening.
I discovered that the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) had a program that would take Hollywood hits and caption them for deaf schools and deaf clubs around the country for free. Even the postage to mail the reels back to HEW cost nothing. But the only problem was that the film would not be available for six months to a year after it first premiered in our neighborhood cinema. So, I wasn’t able to keep up with the water cooler talk. “I just saw ‘Dirty Harry’!” Someone replied, “So?” I thought to myself, why couldn’t I keep up with the world?
Why was it a steep uphill battle to get movies captioned? I learned why it took so long to caption a two-hour movie. You had to use a laser to caption sentences in each frame one by one and be able to time the captions right behind the spoken dialogue. It was a tedious job making sure each sentence appeared at the right time and then the next line of captions has to come along throughout the entire movie. It was the only way I could enjoy Disney classic movies back in the day. But being late is not always better than never.
At the turn of the century, along came digital cinema technology. Instead of tangible equipment with limited configurations, we now have software full of 01010101 codes. With some assistance from today’s AI, programmers can colorize or enhance the color already on film, make the sound more vibrant, and insert captions that can be toggled on or off. Captions can be copied along with the film itself on DVDs or even in the cloud for streaming to private homes or in theaters. Now Hollywood can dazzle us with holograms and avatars. Let’s see what is next in accessible entertainment.
According to a recent Facebook post, WASILC’s Executive Director, Courtney Williams, has been thinking a lot about authenticity and advocacy lately. Recently, someone in our community expressed their opinion that her messaging was mechanical and suggested that people are talking about her using AI as her voice. What they do not know, and didn't ask, is that she uses AI just like a word processing editor to improve spelling, grammar, and now clarity. It has become an accessibility tool for her and others with dyslexia. The thoughts, the heart, and the voice are entirely hers. She was disappointed that a fellow advocate hid that conversation behind the phrase "people are talking" rather than just asking honest questions and opening a direct dialogue with her. In simple terms, Courtney does her due diligence to ensure that what is printed was what she intended to say.
Accessibility changes when technology advances. Courtney and I are proud to use the tools we need to do our job. We both use AI to help us wordsmith our writings, our articles, and our meeting notes. Courtney, who openly admits she has dyslexia, uses AI to help her write masterpiece articles promoting independent living and emergency preparedness. While as a deaf person, I use AI to provide accessibility through automated captioning or for transcriptions occurring during phone calls and virtual meetings when an interpreter is not available. The quality of captioning with AI depends on several factors such as background noise, speaker accents and choice of words. The internet connection by itself can be prone to dropouts causing gaps in transcription. Nevertheless, both of us use technology to communicate at our best.
Even when there is an interpreter during a virtual meeting, I often check the Zoom captioning created by AI to make sure the ASL interpreters are accurately translating what I sign. Sometimes my signs might not be that clear, especially when I host meetings on Zoom or Teams. It sometimes get worse when I fingerspell or sign a long string of numbers. Streaming technology often fails at the wrong time by freezing up when I am trying to say something important.
AI is just a tool, not the end result. When Google launched automatic captioning on YouTube videos in 2009, at first, the captions showed words but no capitalization or punctuation, it looked like one long run-on sentence. This was hailed as a solution to the mass volume of videos whereas, within every hour, the internet produces 24 hours’ worth of video. However, based on my observation since then, it has become much more readable, albeit with mistakes here and there. It will continue to show improvements over the years.
Google has just released a “signs to text” translator app, so it is still in its infancy. The work ahead would probably include decoding facial expressions, deciphering audible sounds, pinpointing regional variations, acknowledging varying levels of fluency, and age of the signer.
Technology signs are one example. Your grandfather may sign telephone differently back then compared to today. Back then, the telephone used to hang on the wall with a corded handset. Today most of us carry a single device in our pocket that can handle a variety of communication formats: voice, data, text, and video. We can be alerted to incoming calls, not with just a bell, but also customized musical tones, a flashing light, or a distinctive vibration pattern. Signs have evolved to show different ways we make and receive calls. The younger generation would be lost if they had to use a black antique desktop phone with a rotary dial or deal with a live operator.
We encourage innovation that improves the quality of our lives. As we discover new technology, we still have a responsibility to vet them for accessibility. It is better to account for access by users with different disabilities in the design stage than to retrofit something that was added on as an afterthought. Students and engineers need to review comments from the end users and then make improvements. At the same time, we do need to heed warnings from industry leaders and insure that we have reliable guardrails for innovation where we can “do no harm”. Don’t wait for the perfect technology, it probably will never happen. But things that are accessible can become the world standard and people will beat a path to your door. The cycle begins again, and the work goes on.
