How AI Makes Coding More Accessible
Popular tech YouTuber Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs fame posted this on X recently:
Nelson’s sentiments struck a chord because he and I feel similarly about artificial intelligence and coding. As I’ve built out Curb Cuts, refining and tweaking its design, I’ve leaned on some custom CSS code to do things the otherwise robust tools Squarespace provides doesn’t allow. These are reflected in things like the tagline in the site’s header, as well as the title casing in the archives. I’m no web developer, so I’m not fluent in HTML or CSS; I know the building blocks, but admittedly need help doing anything requiring heavier lifting. This is where Nelson’s comment on AI and coding is relevant, as I used Google Gemini to help me with generating the CSS code I wanted.
Using Gemini in this way is genius from an accessibility standpoint. For one thing, typing up a quick description of what I need for Gemini is far more accessible than using Google proper to manually search for solutions. In my case, it isn’t so much that I can’t use Google to find a Reddit thread or GitHub repository with what I need; I certainly can, but it comes at a cost: namely, it saps a lot of energy from my eyes and hands from all the scanning and typing. Eye strain and fatigue is more prevalent for me as someone with low vision, since obviously my eyes need to work harder in order to see stuff on my computer—and that’s with accessibility features like Hover Text enabled on my iMac. Likewise, the partial paralysis on the right side of my body, caused by cerebral palsy, makes it that I’m decidedly not a touch typist. I’m more of a hunt-and-peck typist, which means I naturally must be looking at the keyboard to find the letter(s) I want to press.
A chatbot like Gemini is, again, worth its weight in gold given this context. All I need to do is cobble together a sentence or two with what I want to accomplish and send Gemini my prompt. Within a few seconds, it spits out the requested code and, in a nice fit of user interface design, a handy little “Copy Code” button in the top-right corner of the chat window. What’s more, there’s a bonus accessibility win: rather than doing the ⌘-C/V shuffle with my fingers, I instead click the aforementioned “Copy Code” control and easily paste it into my site’s CMS. No muss, no fuss. From a cognition perspective, Gemini’s assistance here has the potential to be even more profound for those who are neurodiverse or cope with other intellectual conditions. A person with a cognitive disability, who may not be able to search Google or write code without being overwhelmed by the how, what, and where involved in such tasks, may find tools like Gemini (or ChatGPT or whatever) invaluable to, in this case, building a website or doing research for various projects. This isn’t conjecture on my part; Jenny Lay-Flurrie, vice president and chief accessibility officer at Microsoft, told me in an interview last year about her teenage daughter, who’s neurodivergent, using the ChatGPT-powered Bing to do research for school essays because it’s more accessible. There surely are other examples, but the salient point is, whether for coding or something else, AI chatbots are bonafide assistive technologies for legions of people in the disability community. All the handwringing over chatbots in classrooms, what with concerns over cheating and an existential threat to pedagogy, fail—predictably so—to see not every student (or teacher) uses these AI tools out of sheer laziness or, more nefariously, a crave to cheat.
So it goes with software development. Whether a blog or iOS development in Xcode, using AI tools to generate code is not merely convenient or expedient—it makes coding downright more accessible too. That’s not at all trivial, especially if you’re an aspiring developer who copes with a disability of some sort that makes writing code difficult.
Speaking of code, while I’m not well-versed in HTML or CSS, I am versed in Markdown. With few exception, everything I write for the internet is written using Markdown—including this very article. I wrote about Markdown and accessibility for TidBITS a little over 12 years ago (!) now. What I wrote in June 2013 stands equally strong in May 2025.
“Markdown has changed my life for the better. Not only is it easier to work with than graphical interfaces given the limitations of my vision, but it has caused me to embrace plain text for nearly all of my documents. No longer do I have to work in bloated word processors with toolbars galore, or worry about rich-text formatting. Discovering Markdown has been liberating in the truest sense of the word,” I wrote of the syntax’s (lasting) influence on my writing. “Given Markdown’s nature, I came to the realization that it, however unintentionally, is in fact a wonderful accessibility tool, because it reduces eye strain while writing. The simplicity of Markdown’s syntax makes it possible to not have to look at the screen every time I want to italicize a word or insert a link.”
It was thrilling, soaking wet behind the ears as I was, to read I made John Gruber’s day.
“Vibe coding” is en vogue right now in the software development space. For me, it isn’t for the reason most assume. In my case, it’s accessibility—which is a vibe all its own.
