From Advocacy to Ambient Accessibility in AI Design Tools

For years I taught designers to learn the accessibility basics, and their answer never changed: make it quick and automatic. Then LLMs changed how designers work, nothing got more accessible, and leadership kept asking when we would automate accessibility. In this talk I walk through how I answered that ask with what I call ambient accessibility: accessibility produced by the environment rather than reached for by a person, encoded into defaults, components and the instructions we hand our tools. You will leave with a view on the question underneath it all: if the environment does the caring, what are the people who care for?