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Review of Generative AI Chatbots' Accessibility

By Meg McMahon

It’s no secret that generative AI chatbots are gaining popularity. With that popularity comes questions about the accessibility of these tools. I conducted screen reader reviews on the top three chatbot AI tools on August 25, 2023. Screen readers are an assistive technology primarily used by folks who have vision impairments. They convert the text on a webpage to speech. 

I have ordered the chatbots from most accessible to least accessible by a screen reader below and have added notes on what makes each chatbot accessible or inaccessible.  

Bard - Highly Accessible

  • Bard gives status updates to the user, for example, it lets a screen reader user know when Bard is generating a response and when Bard has stopped generating a response. Claude and ChatGPT did not do this at the time of testing.
  • Bard has a labeled listen button which helps a user know where to navigate to listen to the generated message.  
  • All buttons are labeled so it is easy to navigate the interface. 

Claude - Accessible but confusing

  • To have the screen reader read the text that Claude generates, a user needs to bring the focus to the copy button before the message they want to read, and then start the screen reader reading feature. There would be no way to tell in a large conversation which copy button corresponds to which message if a user wanted to re-read the middle of the conversation. 
  • The icon bubbles don’t have alt text, which is the text a screen reader uses to verbalize what an icon, image, or button is for the user.
  • All buttons have labels. 

ChatGPT - Inaccessible 

  • To have the screen reader read the text that ChatGPT generates, a user needs to bring the focus to the top of the window and then have the screen reader read the whole page from the top down. There is no way to specify which part of the conversation to read, which makes it hard for a user to easily navigate a long conversation within ChatGPT’s interface. 
  • The buttons have no labels. It is impossible to know which buttons are the copy, edit, and rating buttons on ChatGPT.
 

Overall, it is important for new tools to factor in accessibility. I hope that both Claude and ChatGPT are able to make their products work for screen reader users the same way that they work for sighted users.