Making chatbots accessible

Chatbots are everywhere online customer service is necessary. However, few are accessible to people with disabilities.

Authors note: Because of Medium’s refusal to address its accessibility issues for both authors and readers, I’ve moved my last three years of blogs to Substack. Please sign up there for notices of all new articles. Thank you for your continued readership and support.

Anything a company can shift from an employee to a computer saves them money. That is why many retail companies are now using chatbots to answer simple questions to facilitate sales without having to involve humans who get a paycheck..

A chatbot is a piece of software that runs on either a mobile device or desktop, which companies use to conduct online chat conversations via text or text-to-speech, instead of providing direct contact with a live human agent.

• With a well crafted chatbot, sometimes it’s difficult for users to tell if they are talking to a human or a computer.
• Most chatbots provide the ability to transfer from the computer to a human when the ability of the chatbot information is exhausted.

Many people with hearing loss prefer to use chatbots because it reduces or eliminates the need to have a voice…