Artificial Intelligence and Disabled Adults: Current Use, Perceptions, and Future Development

Research Objectives: To understand current use of AI, perceptions of AI, and areas of preferred future AI development for disabled adults

Design: Data collection of Disabled Adults on their current use of AI, perceptions of AI, and areas of preferred future AI development. Data sampling was through the Accessibility User Research Collective (AURC), a nationally representative panel of 1,532 Disabled Adults across the United States.

Setting: Study respondents completed an online self-administered survey in February of 2024.

Participants: 335 Disabled Adults from the Accessibility User Research Collective (AURC).

Interventions: none

Main Outcome Measures: Disabled adults’ use and perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) in a series of contexts including current use, barriers and facilitators to use, trust of AI, and ideal future development areas of AI.

Results: Use of AI:
Adults with Disabilities use AI for communication in multiple ways with the most used being personal virtual assistants (80.90%), followed by customer service chatbots (61.79%), and conversational generative AI (57.01%). Adults with Disabilities often use AI for creativity and enhancement with over half of Disabled adults using AI via search engines (83.28%), text editing (72.24%), predictive text (69.25%), consumer recommendations (66.57%), and social media feeds (54.03%).

Improve Lives:
People with disabilities agreed with a vast majority (87.4%) that AI has the potential to improve the lives of people with disabilities.

Trust of AI:
People with disabilities have a generally neutral position on trust in relation to AI (47.7%), however, of those that trust AI (25.2%) and of those that do not trust AI (27.0%), there was a slightly higher percentage of 1.8% that distrust AI. People who trust AI note that accessibility and company reputation as key drivers of their trust, more so than people who distrust AI. People who distrust AI are driven by data privacy, news and media reports, transparency of AI decision making, and other factors more commonly than people who trust AI. The accuracy of AI and previous experiences with AI do not have a different prevalence for those who do and do not trust AI.

Future AI Development Interest:
96.36% of Disabled Adults have an interest in future AI Development with deep interest in development for communication (71.82%), household chores and general maintenance (62.42%), health and wellness (62.12%), and hobbies/leisure activities (60.61%).

Conclusions: Disabled Adults use AI regularly, think AI is beneficial, and future developments should focus on communication, household needs, health, and hobbies.

Author(s) Disclosures: none