Meet The Accessibility 200—And Their AI Tools
Meet The Accessibility 200—And Their AI Tools
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hnewman/2026/05/19/meet-the-accessibility-200-and-their-ai-tools/
Publish Date: 2026-05-19 09:48:00
Source Domain: www.forbes.com
Steffy McQuiggin, who is deaf-blind, carries on a conversation using Tatum Robotics’ AI-powered Tatum1, which turns written and spoken words into sign language deaf-blind individuals can feel with their hands.
Tatum Robotics
You search Amazon for a product: say, gourmet coffee. But instead of the robust, buttery blend you wanted, you’re served with “1-48 of over 100,000 results for ‘coffee’.” You gamely tick some filters and click a few product pages, but after a few minutes, you give up and hit the nearest Starbucks.
For people with limited vision or certain types of autism, that sense of overwhelm is even more dramatic. Enter AI.
Return to the site and Amazon’s Help Me Decide button can pop up, offering the best 2-3 choices based on your previous purchases and clicks, what other people similar to you liked, relevant reviews and more. AI also powers Amazon’s Dialog Boost option, which helps the hearing-impaired (and anyone else) better understand what characters are saying when those loud action-movie sound effects go boom. And AI helped to build the underlying voice models for Kindle Assistive Reader, which reads all Kindle ebooks aloud while a highlight follows the text, used by people who prefer to absorb information with multiple modalities, parents teaching their children to read—and the blind.
”AI is actually the first thing that really, truly has the potential to tip the scales in the way we think about equitable experiences for people with disabilities,” says JoAnna Hansen, Amazon’s director of Experience Quality Technologies. ”It comes with a lot of risk. We have to be very thoughtful about how we do it. But it levels the playing field.”
Part of the global artificial intelligence boom derives from how it creates ultra-personalized interactions (some might call relationships) with technologies and products. For people with disabilities, from mobility and sensory limitations to cognitive and limb differences—meaning about one-sixth…
