Prediction: AI will make accessibility worse

Vibe coding, agentic engineering or coding, conversational programming, and others are terms for using AI (Artificial Intelligence, not actual intelligence) to create code, products and systems. There are many reasons AI goes wrong, and you can see a lot of them in the collection, AI is going just great. So I'm not going to write about that. Instead, I'll focus on one thing. AI can only process what it is told.

People with little or no coding knowledge are writing code, and companies are passing the responsibility for it to AI. But they already don't think about accessibility enough, so that accelerates the creation of code with issues. So the situation is only going to get worse unless we do more testing.

I predict that the WebAIM Million report will trend back up over the next few years. If you haven't heard of it, the report uses the WAVE tool (Web Accessibility Evaluation) to scan 1 million home pages and reports its findings. The 2026 report showed the number of detected errors increased by 10.1% since 2025. I shudder to think how much worse it is going to be. 

What can you do? Learn to test for accessibility. The MoTaverse has so many resources on the subject. Courses and articles that walk you through simple tests. Instructions for fixing the top issues. All created by me and others. If you know about digital accessibility, and still do nothing about it. I'm sorry, but you are the problem. Ask questions. Highlight problems. Share information from the MoTaverse and other sources. Learn about the European Accessibility Act, the American Disabilities Act, and others that relate to your location. Do. Something.