The Perceptual Gap: Why We Need Accessible XAI for Assistive Technologies

Artificial intelligence systems are widely used by people with sensory disabilities, like loss of vision or hearing, to help perceive or navigate the world around them. This includes tasks like describing an image or object they cannot touch, reading documents, automatically captioning speech, and so on. Presently, models used for these tasks are based on deep neural networks and are thusly black boxes. Explainable AI (XAI) describes methods that can explain why a model gave the output it did. However, existing XAI methodologies are rarely accessible or designed with disabled users in mind. In this paper, we survey existing work in XAI with a focus on human-centered and accessibility-centered approaches or evaluations. We show that there is next-to-no XAI work that accounts for people with sensory disabilities, that many typical explanations are difficult for them to comprehend, and propose possible avenues for future work in Accessible Human-Centered XAI.