Jakob Has Jumped the Shark

If you have been following the saga of Jakob Nielsen, there a few quotes I could use here:

• Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster (Nietzsche).
• They which play with the devils rattles, will be brought by degrees to wield his sword (Fuller).
• You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain (Dent).

In time I expect this will happen to me. I will write some opinion piece or guidance that mostly just diminishes the audience I claim to champion, and in so doing lay bare all my own biases.

But this post title is much simpler because it seems Jakob might also be on the fake-AI grift. While trying to stay relevant.

What Now?

Over on Substack, the platform with a Nazi problem that its owner refuses to address (because sometimes the medium is the message), Jakob Nielsen has shared Accessibility Has Failed: Try Generative UI = Individualized UX. Note that I link to the Wayback version — because of all the juice I have, my link juice is not on offer here.

There is a lot wrong with the post. But people much faster than I on the keyboard and firmly familiar with this subject have already said it.

Don’t buy his snake oil. It’s bad enough accessibility activists have to fight overlays, now we have to fight this too?

You can BOTH recognize his initial contributions to this space AND understand people you hold in high esteem can be problematic and sometimes need to take a seat and listen.

In other words, some users get the full experience, the one with all the words, all the context, and all the options. But if Nielsen’s AI thinks you have a disability, you’ll get a different experience, a simpler experience that’s more appropriate for people like you. It’s an ugly kind of paternalism with a new AI twist.

In a remark reminiscent of “I don’t see color”, he makes a point of clarifying that he himself differs from “the accessibility movement” in that he considers “users with disabilities to be simply users”. He appears to dismiss the importance of recognising specific challenges.

Jakob Nielsen is right — he is not like all those accessibility advocates. In fact, I find his interpretation of the impact of accessibility as a movement throughout the newsletter piece to be both dismissive and contradictory.

At no point in any of this—again, classic Jakob Nielsen style—does he cite an actual blind user, much less any blind assistive technology researchers or developers, like Mick Curran and Jamie Teh, the creators of the NVDA screen reader. Or Chris Hofstader, who helped build JAWS and has written for over a decade about blind UX. Or Chancey Fleet, who teaches 3D modeling using screen readers at the New York Public Library. Or Chieko Asakawa, one of IBM’s most decorated computer scientists. Or TV Raman, who among numerous other things built a screen reader inside the Emacs text editor. Or Josh Miele, a literal MacArthur Fellow for his work in the field, including tactile maps and object identification.

Nielsen thinks that generative AI will make my experience better. Nielsen apparently doesn’t realise that generative AI barely understands accessibility, never mind how to make accessible experiences for humans.

I could delicately, patiently, and painstakingly debunk the gigantic, misplaced swing of a man who is burning others’ lived experience as fuel to propel his increasingly irrelevant career.

Therefore, I find the idea of a generative UI appealing, and I am a proponent of the idea that web browsers should implement similar functionality. For that reason, I find the article’s dismissal of all the progress that has been made in digital accessibility and the efforts of those who have gone before us to make that progress a reality to be extremely disappointing.

Sweeping statements that accessibility “has failed” are often misguided. Improving 10% of accessibility errors in a category in four years is good. It’s trending in the right direction. Of course, there are still a lot of issues, but that is to be expected.

“[T]he ability to generate a different user interface for every user”. The what now? How it will do this magical thing is left as an exercise for the reader.

Will we have some “AI” technology breakthrough at some point? Maybe. But do we really want to squander “AI” technology on simple things that are essentials? Like having “AI” figure out the text on a button or the alternative text of the 1000th edit pencil icon? Is that a good use of our resources? Especially with the incredible amount of energy these models currently use.

Accessibility is about people. It is not a strictly technical problem to be solved with code. It is not the approximation of human-like ramblings produced by the complex algorithms generally branded as “AI”.

Why Now?

I am mostly gathering this “clips show” of responses because I need something to reference when yet another client points to Nielsen’s latest missive as justification for a user-harming decision. Because pointing out his possible eugenics bent which may have tainted his former employer (and which still bears his name) has historically not been enough.

Hey Now

Nowhere does Nielsen indicate how this model would work. It has to detect a user’s disability (problematic to say the least). It also has to generate custom UIs based on things this automation has to learn from the very industry he claims has failed.

Maybe this paradox doesn’t matter to his target audience — fake-AI grifters with access to money to pay him.

At least we’ll always have his 10 heuristics. He can’t take that away, no matter how hard his notional infantalizing fake-AI might try.