Artificial intelligence continues to progress at a fast pace, renovating one industry after another. One area where AI has already confirmed success is in refining the day-to-day lives of individuals with disabilities. Cases include a brain-spinal cord interface that aids people relearn how to walk, AI-enabled speech assistants (such as Olga Phone and Google Assistant) making it easier for visually impaired individuals to use their smartphones, education algorithms that permit computers to recognize users’ intentions and anticipate an instruction, etc.
Roughly 87 million individuals in the European Union suffer from some form of disability, which can occasionally result in their elimination from the workplace or even from culture as a whole. According to statistics issued by the European Parliament in June 2020, there is substantial room for enhancement when it comes to their specialized integration: the employment rate for individuals with disabilities in the EU (ages 20 to 64) is at 50.8 percent, related to 75 percent for able-bodied people.
Given that admittance to employment depends primarily and foremost on access to training, how can disabled individuals be better assisted in learning using AI tools?
Impact AI is a French association whose associates include companies, start-ups, and schools that educate future data analysts. Together, they are searching for resolutions to create “conditions favorable to human-centered AI”.
The group has carried out research in cooperation with the EdTech association to understand specific needs (according to the nature of disability: hearing, visual, physical, cognitive, etc.) and recognize present technological solutions. These are normally based on powerful systems and intelligent software capable of analyzing information and creating responses to certain instructions. They facilitate, for example, image recognition and analysis, lip-reading, transcript audio into text (dictation, generation of subtitles), conversion into sign language, etc.
One of the projects the group is offering and supporting is Roger Voice, a solution merging automatic speech acknowledgment and voice intonation, intended for the deaf and hard of hearing. Another is ISIcrunch, a software solution that utilizes AI to produce online texts (such as ebooks or epubs) by digitizing education materials and altering them into manageable formats.
Increasing the accessibility of digital resources for individuals with sensory or cognitive impairments signifies a major challenge for inclusion and the future of work, and is the topic of an international treaty between the European Union and the World Intellectual Property Organisation.
According to Jan Ramon, a scientist at the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA), Incorporation into working life is better thanks to technology.
Some employees with disabilities are already using automatic transcript and text recognition to aid them with their tasks. I think that AI will benefit these people [more and more] over the years to come. “But it’s early days yet”. In Ramon’s view, the latest advances in AI are still mainly intended for the general public and often fail to target people with disabilities.
Federico Camporesi a part of the Association for Research and Training on Integration in Europe (ARFIE) on the difficulties of integrating disabled workers into the workroom. In his view, “businesses and even governments should participate in promoting development in this area”.
AI technologies for disabled individuals have seen greater advances in certain business sectors, mainly on those who have involved work with computers and intellectual, rather than physical, functions.
Voice assistant technology is presently booming. Olivier Gatelmand is the founder of Olga, a voice assistant for smartphones designed for people with reduced autonomy or visual impairments. “We created the service seven years ago. At the time, artificial intelligence was not at all common. Every access to our phone is voice-activated. We implemented a system in Olga that enables conversational intelligence to be used to search for information. Users can then learn more easily and receive help in their decision-making. It’s kind of like a voice-activated ChatGPT”.
Presently we are mainly focusing on people with visual and motor disabilities. But it’s important to understand that disabled people have different abilities,” says Gatelmand, who has also addressed the possibility of diction problems in users. We’ve carried out tests with autistic children. Based on a specific case, we learned that artificial intelligence could potentially rephrase words in sentences that are difficult to understand”.
As a visually impaired person, Ramon uses services to help him in his day-to-day life. Such as, when he was interviewed, the words he says appear on his screen. It’s a way of getting a better grasp of what’s being said. This technology still has room to improve. He predicts that people who are deaf or hard of hearing will be able to get a similar application in about two years.
However, several questions remain unanswered, mostly about the legislative framework for supporting the introduction of new tools. Society evolves, opportunities evolve, but the issues related to legislation require a great deal of knowledge, continues Camporesi.
The issue of digital privacy rights about technology in the workplace is not specific to disabled workers alone.
