Using AI in the education of disabled people

Hi everyone,

I'd like to talk about how AI can be used in the education and learning of disabled people, and hear about your experiences too. To start, let me simply describe a method I use myself. I won't go into much technical detail, because explaining how it's done step by step touches on things like copyright, and I want to handle that carefully. Once I've looked into those issues and I'm sure there won't be any problems, I'm thinking of opening a separate thread called something like "making accessible books" and properly explaining the method there. My aim here is just to share what a big difference AI has made for me.

As someone with low vision, I've spent years preparing my own reading material. The process used to go like this: I'd scan a book, turn it into a PDF, then convert it to EPUB with a program (FineReader). But structures like tables often came out wrong, falling apart and becoming unreadable. There were also text recognition (OCR) errors, so I constantly had to fix things by hand.

AI has made this so much easier now. Text recognition accuracy has clearly improved, so I get cleaner text with fewer errors. Tables that don't come out properly, I can have turned into a list format that's more readable for me. If there's a chart or an image in the text, I can ask for it to be described in words, so I can find out what something I can't see is actually showing. When needed, I can have sections in different languages correctly tagged and marked up, which helps screen readers and text-to-speech tools read the text properly.

In short, a task that used to take me hours and always ended up half-finished, I can now do in a way that fits my own needs exactly. For me, that's the best thing about AI: instead of forcing one single form of accessibility on everyone, it lets each person adapt things to their own needs.

Do you use any AI methods for education, work, or accessibility? Whether it's related to vision or to some other need, I'd love to hear your experiences. Maybe we can all learn some new techniques from each other.