The Next Test of Digital Progress: Keeping People at the Center of AI and Accessibility
As governments digitize essential services and artificial intelligence transforms how people interact with technology, digital accessibility is becoming a defining measure of inclusion, public trust, and responsible leadership.
Imagine being told that the easiest way to access a government service is online.
You need to renew an identity document, apply for public assistance, schedule a medical appointment, or complete a tax declaration. The process should take only a few minutes.
But what happens if you cannot navigate the website using a keyboard? If the application form is incompatible with your screen reader? If important instructions are provided in a video without captions, or an AI-powered assistant cannot understand the way you communicate?
For millions of people, these are not hypothetical inconveniences. They are barriers that can prevent them from accessing essential services, exercising their rights, and participating fully in society.
As governments and businesses accelerate their digital transformation, we must ask a fundamental question: What does technological progress really mean if significant parts of society cannot benefit from it?
Accessibility Is About People, Not Just Technology
Digital accessibility is often misunderstood as a technical requirement, something addressed by developers or compliance teams after a website has already been created.
Its implications extend far beyond technology.
According to the World Health Organization, approximately 1.3 billion people, or 16% of the global population, experience a significant disability. That represents roughly one in every six people worldwide.
These individuals may encounter barriers related to vision, hearing, mobility, cognition, or communication. Digital accessibility seeks to remove those barriers by ensuring websites, mobile applications, documents, and other digital services can be used by people with diverse abilities.
But accessibility is not exclusively relevant to people with permanent disabilities.
Consider an elderly person struggling with small text, someone recovering from an injury who cannot use a mouse, or a commuter who needs captions because they cannot listen to audio.
Accessible design benefits all of them.
This is why accessibility should not be viewed as an accommodation for a small segment of society. It is an investment in creating digital experiences that work for everyone.
And increasingly, those experiences shape almost every aspect of our lives.
When Government Goes Digital, Accessibility Becomes a Public Responsibility
Perhaps nowhere are the consequences of inaccessible technology more significant than in government.
Across the world, public institutions are moving essential services online. Citizens increasingly interact with government through digital portals for healthcare, education, taxation, employment, social benefits, and civic participation.
The potential advantages are considerable.
Digital services can reduce administrative costs, improve efficiency, eliminate unnecessary travel, and make government more responsive to citizens’ needs.
The United Nations E-Government Survey 2024, covering all 193 UN Member States, documents substantial progress in digital government development. Yet it also highlights persistent disparities and the importance of ensuring that digital transformation is inclusive.
This creates a profound responsibility for public institutions.
A government website is not simply another digital product. It may be the primary gateway through which citizens access services to which they are entitled.
If that gateway is inaccessible, the consequences can extend well beyond inconvenience.
A person who cannot complete an online benefits application may miss essential financial assistance. A patient unable to navigate a healthcare portal may struggle to secure an appointment. Someone who cannot access official information may find it harder to understand or exercise their rights.
A public service cannot be considered fully available if the people who need it cannot use it.
Governments should therefore treat digital accessibility as an essential component of public service delivery, not merely a compliance obligation.
The objective should not simply be to put more government services online. It should be to make those services genuinely available to more people.
Artificial Intelligence: An Opportunity That Requires Human Judgment
Artificial intelligence is introducing another profound transformation in how people interact with digital services.
AI-powered assistants can help citizens find information, navigate complex procedures, translate content, and interact with organizations through conversational interfaces.
For people with disabilities, these developments offer extraordinary possibilities.
AI could help make information easier to understand, provide new ways of interacting with technology, improve captions and descriptions, and reduce some of the complexity associated with traditional digital interfaces.
Imagine someone with limited mobility navigating a government service through voice commands, or a person with a cognitive disability receiving explanations of complicated administrative instructions in simpler language.
These are examples of how AI could make digital interactions more inclusive.
But there is an important distinction between using AI to support accessibility and assuming that AI can solve accessibility challenges independently.
AI is helping organizations identify accessibility issues earlier, analyze large volumes of digital content, and accelerate certain remediation tasks. These capabilities are contributing to a broader shift away from reactive accessibility fixes toward proactive, continuous accessibility management embedded throughout design, development, quality assurance, and content creation.
However, AI does not yet have a complete understanding of real-world user experiences. Its capabilities depend on the data, training, and context available to it, and accessibility presents challenges that cannot always be reduced to automated rules.
An AI system may identify a missing description for an image but struggle to determine whether the description communicates the information that matters most to the user. An automated test may find no detectable errors in a form, while someone using assistive technology still finds the process confusing or impossible to complete.
Overreliance on automation can therefore create a false sense of confidence.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which develops internationally recognized web accessibility standards, explicitly acknowledges that automated evaluation tools cannot assess every aspect of accessibility and that human judgment remains essential.
This is why keeping humans in the loop is so important.
Accessibility specialists, developers, designers, and, crucially, people with disabilities themselves must remain involved in evaluating digital experiences and determining whether they actually meet users’ needs.
AI can help identify potential problems and recommend solutions. Human expertise is needed to validate those recommendations, understand their practical implications, and ensure that the resulting experiences work for real people.
For governments, the stakes are particularly high. An inaccessible AI-powered service may not simply frustrate a customer; it may prevent a citizen from accessing healthcare, financial assistance, or other essential services.
The goal should therefore be neither to resist AI nor to delegate accessibility entirely to it.
It should be to combine the efficiency and scale of intelligent technology with the judgment, empathy, and lived experience that only people can provide.
From Compliance to Continuous Responsibility
The need for greater attention to digital accessibility is supported by evidence.
In its 2026 WebAIM Million study, WebAIM analyzed the home pages of one million websites and found that 95.9% contained automatically detectable failures of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) requirements.
While this does not mean every aspect of those websites was inaccessible, it illustrates how widespread detectable accessibility problems remain.
As digital environments grow more complex and AI accelerates the creation of software and content, addressing these issues consistently becomes even more important.
Accessibility cannot be treated as a one-time exercise conducted before a website or application launches. Digital services are constantly changing, and new content, functionality, and technologies can introduce new barriers.
Organizations are increasingly recognizing the need for continuous accessibility management that combines automated monitoring, human expertise, testing, and ongoing improvement.
At the same time, regulatory expectations are elevating accessibility from a narrow compliance exercise to a broader governance priority, requiring organizations to establish more mature and sustainable approaches.
The growing importance of digital accessibility is also reflected in the technology industry itself.
In 2026, Gartner published its inaugural Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Accessibility, marking another milestone in the evolution of accessibility from a specialized compliance concern into a broader technology and governance priority.
Among the companies recognized in the report, Allyable was named a Visionary in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Accessibility.
The significance extends beyond any individual company. The emergence of a dedicated Magic Quadrant demonstrates the increasing attention being given to digital accessibility as organizations recognize the need for more systematic, continuous approaches to ensuring digital inclusion.
The True Measure of Progress
There is another dimension of the digital divide that deserves attention.
The International Telecommunication Union estimated that 2.2 billion people remained offline in 2025.
Closing that connectivity gap remains essential. But access to the internet is only the beginning.
A person may have a smartphone, an internet connection, and access to a government website, yet still be unable to complete an essential transaction because of barriers in the service itself.
Connectivity does not automatically mean accessibility. And accessibility is a necessary part of meaningful digital inclusion.
As governments invest in increasingly sophisticated technology, the temptation will be to measure success through the number of services digitized, processes automated, or transactions completed.
Those measures matter, but they are incomplete.
We should also ask who can successfully use these services. Who still requires assistance? Who is being excluded? And what is being done to remove the barriers they encounter?
Answering these questions requires more than sophisticated algorithms. It requires human understanding, institutional accountability, and a willingness to involve the people whose lives are affected by these decisions.
Ultimately, the promise of technology is not simply to make institutions more efficient. It is to help them serve people more effectively.
The next chapter of digital transformation will undoubtedly be shaped by artificial intelligence, automation, and technologies we have yet to imagine.
But its success should be measured against something far more enduring: our ability to ensure that technological advancement translates into greater opportunity, dignity, and participation for everyone.
The most advanced digital society is not necessarily the one with the most sophisticated technology. It is the one that combines technological progress with human understanding, ensuring that no one is left behind.
About the Author
David Adi
Co-Founder and CEO, Allyable
David Adi is the co-founder and CEO of Allyable, a digital accessibility platform built on artificial intelligence and based in Philadelphia, named a Visionary in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Accessibility. Drawing on his own experience of disability, he champions digital services that work for everyone, including people with disabilities and older users, and writes on accessibility, compliance and inclusive technology for enterprises and governments.
Great article