Blind people excluded from benefits of AI, says charity

PARIS: Blind and partially sighted people are being excluded from the benefits of artificial intelligence tools and facing “a new level of discrimination”, the new president of the Royal Society for Blind Children has claimed as he called for better design of everything from video games to AI agents.

Tom Pey said existing difficulties for blind children were “now compounded because they’re excluded (and) distanced from their non-disabled peers, because those people can experience games, alternative realities and the AI-driven visual types of technology”.

Pey lost his sight as a child and created the Waymap app which offers step-by-step audio navigation instructions.

His comments come as tech firms launch more visually based AI-powered systems such as Meta’s range of spectacles and the Google Lens function, which relies on users pointing their phone camera at objects or places.

Pey called on the technology secretary, Peter Kyle, to “formulate laws that will support the needs of disabled people, but also help direct the big companies and startups, so they include disabled people”.

“If we look at the hardware around AI, a lot of it is visual, and it ignores the needs of blind people, and it ignores people who have difficulty, not just with not being able to see, but being able to interpret visual imagery,” he said. “Those people, like me and others, we’re just excluded.”

People with sight loss are less likely to use the internet every day, more likely to be digitally excluded and less likely to own a smartphone compared with the rest of the population, research by the Royal National Institute of Blind People recently found. But it also reported that digital exclusion for blind and partially sighted people was reducing and that AI technology was becoming more accessible.

In response, tech companies including Google, Meta and Open AI all pointed to initiatives to use their tech to help blind and partially sighted people.