Why Do We Fix AI Bias But Ignore Accessibility Bias?

Kalev Leetaru, Contributor, Forbes, July 6, 2019
Silicon Valley has become obsessed with addressing AI bias. As deep learning algorithms have graduated from the academic research lab into the real world, there has become a growing awareness of the implications of their innate biases as their limited Western training data has collided spectacularly with a globalized digital world. Confronted with an increasingly skeptical public, relentless press coverage and growing policymaker interest, the deep learning community has responded with a wave of investments and initiatives focusing on how to address such bias. This same digital transformation has brought with it an increasingly inaccessible Web that is creating an ever-greater digital divide for those with differing physical abilities, placing more and more of the world out of their reach. Yet in stark contrast with the enormous resources being poured into combating AI bias, accessibility bias has received little attention, reminding us that only those biases most visible to the general public receive attention.