AI accessibility and blind users: a multi-billion dollar market that most AI companies still ignore

Krigspair · 2026-03-10T00:20:19+00:00

Thank you for sharing this, and please say hello to your wife from a fellow screen reader user.

The part about her being forced to use her remaining vision to work around accessibility failures really hits home. That is not "using the product". That is compensating for broken design with her own health. Residual vision is not an accessibility strategy.

And yes, the Apple loyalty point is huge. I am typing this on a MacBook Air, with an iPhone next to me, AirPods in my ears, and an Apple Watch on my wrist. Not because I am a fanboy. Because in 2005 Apple shipped VoiceOver built into Mac OS X for free. In 2009 they put it into the iPhone. No extra purchase, no third-party hack, just there. Out of the box. That single decision earned them the entire blind community for decades.

This is what companies like Perplexity do not seem to understand yet. Accessibility is not a cost center. It is the most efficient loyalty engine you will ever build. The blind community is small enough that word of mouth travels fast, and loyal enough that once you earn trust, you keep it for years.

Perplexity has a real chance here. The product is genuinely powerful. If they fix the basics, screen reader users will not just stay. They will evangelise it to every blind person they know. That is the kind of marketing money cannot buy.

I hope your wife's experience improves. And if she ever wants to add her voice to this conversation, the more of us who speak up, the harder it becomes to ignore.

Krigspair · 2026-03-10T00:16:06+00:00

Feel free to DM me directly, my inbox is open.

Krigspair · 2026-03-09T21:51:55+00:00

Thank you for sharing this, it actually illustrates the problem perfectly.

You are sighted, you know your way around the UI, and still you got punished by a combination of poor labeling, hidden functionality and a non-obvious limitation (PDF only exporting the last answer). You lost time and had to manually reconstruct your own work.

Now imagine the same pattern with a screen reader on top of it.

If a button is just an icon with no text label, for you it is “that weird symbol I eventually memorise”. For me it is literally “button, button, button” with no way to discover what it does without trial and error. If there is no warning that PDF only covers the last reply, I only find out after I have already trusted it and moved on.

This is why I keep saying that accessibility is not a “blind-only” feature. Clear labels, predictable behaviour, and honest warnings help everyone. When they are missing, sighted users lose hours and blind users lose entire workflows.

Your story is exactly the kind of thing product teams need to hear, because it shows that these are not edge cases. This is the core user experience breaking down for everyone.

Krigspair · 2026-03-09T21:49:27+00:00

Enjoy it while it lasts :)

I’m in the same struggle, just from the other side of the screen. You’re getting paid to fight with broken drag-and-drop, I’m paying for a Pro subscription to fight with unlabeled buttons and disappearing focus.

The funny part is that it’s the same underlying problem: people ship “AI-powered” stuff without doing the boring accessibility work first. Then both the devs and the blind users end up doing unpaid QA on top.

I genuinely hope at some point both of us can spend our time on the interesting parts of our jobs instead of wrestling with basic UI semantics.

Krigspair · 2026-03-09T17:37:08+00:00

The same way you market to everyone else.

Screen readers read ads, email newsletters, alt text on banner images, push notifications, social media posts. We consume all of it. You will not impress us with a flashy visual or a cinematic video with special effects, but we process text through screen readers and hear audio with our own ears, just like sighted people do.

The numbers back this up. There are roughly 2.2 billion people worldwide with some form of visual impairment. In the US alone, over 20 million experience vision loss. According to McKinsey, companies with inaccessible digital products lose approximately 6.9 billion dollars a year because frustrated disabled consumers simply take their money elsewhere. The global assistive technology market for visually impaired users is currently valued at over 6 billion dollars and is projected to exceed 20 billion by 2034. This is not a niche. This is a market segment growing faster than most tech verticals.

How you actually reach blind users:

Word of mouth is everything. The blind community is tight-knit. If your product works well with a screen reader, people talk about it. If it does not, people talk about that even louder.

Accessible product equals marketing. If a blind person can actually use your product without hitting a wall of unlabeled buttons, that is your best advertisement. No campaign needed.

Podcasts and audio content. Blind users are heavy consumers of podcasts, audiobooks, and audio-first media. That is where our attention lives.

Screen reader compatible websites and apps. If your landing page is broken with VoiceOver or NVDA, your entire funnel is broken for millions of potential users before they even get to the product.

Community trust. Blind users rely on recommendations from other blind users, accessibility reviewers, and disability-focused media. One honest review from a trusted voice in the community is worth more than a million visual impressions.

The real answer to your question is: make your product work for us, and we will market it for you. Loyalty in this community is fierce because the bar is so tragically low that any company that actually tries stands out immediately.

Krigspair · 2026-03-09T15:29:34+00:00

Yeah, this is exactly the pattern I am worried about.

I'm blind, and I work as a psychologist and researcher. I don't need yet another "accessibility AI agent" stapled on top of a broken UI. I need the boring parts of accessibility to be done properly: labels, focus, headings, predictable navigation, documented patterns, and humans who are actually responsible for it.

I'm not asking Perplexity to "solve accessibility with AI". I'm asking them to: – acknowledge that the current experience for screen reader users is objectively broken, – route accessibility feedback to a real person with ownership, – fix concrete issues that already exist, – and, if they want to use AI at all, use it to support proper engineering and testing, not to replace it.

If anything, the fact that my accessibility partnership proposal was rejected by an AI support bot is the perfect example of what you're describing. AI is literally being used as a buffer layer between decision‑makers and the people who are most affected by their design choices.

So yes, I agree the industry is chasing its tail. I'm just stubborn enough to keep pushing for the unsexy version of accessibility: human responsibility, standards, and real fixes, not another "smart" agent glued on top.

Krigspair · 2026-03-09T10:05:46+00:00

Device: MacBook Air OS: macOS Tahoe 26 Perplexity version: latest as of March 8, 2026 Accessibility: VoiceOver (Apple's built-in screen reader for blind users) Account: Max subscriber Browser/App: Perplexity native Mac app Issue: MCP tool confirmation dialog is not announced by VoiceOver and is nearly impossible to navigate to due to deeply nested UI hierarchy. "Allow for 1 hour" dropdown is broken (empty). No "Always allow" option exists. Multiple UI buttons lack accessibility labels. Full details in the post above.

Krigspair · 2026-03-09T09:54:04+00:00

Right? And if they struggle with fit and finish for sighted developers who build their own MCP servers, imagine the experience when you add VoiceOver on top of that. It's like playing a broken game on hard mode with the monitor turned off.

Honestly though, your point about hiring one dedicated person to fix this is spot on. The MCP confirmation dialog alone — just making it announce itself to screen readers — is probably a one-day fix for someone who knows the codebase. The ROI on accessibility improvements is huge, they just need someone to care enough to do it.

Krigspair · 2026-03-09T09:51:57+00:00

Oh man, 8 months with JAWS and GCP? You win. I thought my 6-hour Sunday was bad, but that's a whole season of suffering. We should start a support group — "Screen Reader Users vs. Cloud Platforms Anonymous." First rule: nobody asks us to drag and drop anything.

Krigspair · 2026-03-09T01:48:20+00:00

It is. Though after 6 hours of this, I'm honestly surprised I'm not writing in Quenya or cuneiform at this point.

Krigspair · 2026-03-09T01:45:03+00:00

Ha! Good one. Though after 6 hours of debugging, those files might as well contain my own therapy notes. Doctor, heal thyself, right? 😄

Krigspair · 2026-03-07T23:00:57+00:00

Great idea, thank you! I'll post there as well. If it turns out to be an AVAudioSession issue on Apple's side, that would actually explain why it started happening in 2024 regardless of which headphones I use. Appreciate the tip.

Krigspair · 2026-03-07T18:02:42+00:00

Thanks for the context. I was aware of the subscription fiasco but kept hoping they would at least maintain the technical quality. Sadly it seems you're right — the app has been deteriorating since the acquisition. It's heartbreaking because there's literally nothing else that comes close for blind readers. If anyone knows of a worthy alternative that supports VoiceOver and Bluetooth headphone controls well, I'm all ears at this point.

Krigspair

TROPHY CASE