Affordances for me, but not for thee

Link: The Web Is Being Made Accessible for AI, Not People, by Jonathan Zong and Frank Elavsky in Tech Policy PressThis is worth sitting with:“The modern web, originally built for sighted humans using browsers, is now being redesigned for a new kind of user.What these developers are offering their AI visitors is essentially an accessibility accommodation. […] But when the audience is a disabled person, it has historically been treated as an afterthought. Structured, concise text-based representations of complex content are almost exactly the kind of accommodation that blind and low-vision screen reader users have spent decades requesting from web developers, largely in vain.”One of the oddest parts of the AI shift is that people are much more willing to do things for LLMs that they should have been doing for human beings all along. Accessibility is clearly an important one: 95% of websites have accessibility flaws, and convincing teams to allocate time for accessibility concerns can be…