Accessibility & Aging
Accessibility and aging — where a system starts excluding people
Who does a well-built technology leave out?
Accessibility is not a separate feature for disabled people; it exposes what body, what senses and what speed a system quietly assumes. Aging is the reminder that everyone eventually falls outside those assumptions.
The assumption is always hidden
That you can see the screen, that your hand does not shake, that you respond within three seconds, that you have the capacity to relearn a redesigned UI — none of this gets written into a spec. Because it is not written, it is not tested.
What AI changes here, and what it does not
AI makes conversion cheap — reading aloud, summarising, shifting modality. That is a real change. But the quality of the conversion is uneven, and the person who most needs it may be exactly the person with no way to check it. In assistive technology, trust is a heavier problem than convenience.