At United Nations Headquarters, New York, on 11 June 2025, Prof. Alexiei Dingli spoke at the 18th Conference of States Parties to the CRPD (COSP18) with a rallying cry for “”. In his panel intervention, he argued that people with disabilities must steer—rather than merely consume—the coming waves of artificial intelligence.
His is simple: place disability at the starting line and inclusion becomes the baseline. When systems are designed for the edges of human experience, they inevitably serve the middle better too. He exposed the hidden cost of exclusionary technology, from hiring bots that misread autistic eye contact to speech engines that garble a stutter, and reframed accessibility as both moral imperative and trillion-dollar growth strategy.
To convert vision into action, he proposed three levers:
- Accessible AI Seal – a mark that fast-tracks compliant products into public procurement and investor portfolios.
- Accessibility Accelerator – a blended-finance fund for tactile wearables, low-vision coding tools and other frontier innovations led by founders with disabilities.
- Reverse Mentorship Programme – pairing technologists with people having disabilities inside AI labs to marry lived expertise with commercial R&D.
Real-world successes underpin his case: Tokyo’s Avatar Robot Café, where servers with spinal cord injuries pilot robots from home; Fable Tech Labs, which pays disabled testers to expose accessibility flaws; and Auticon, whose 600 autistic consultants turn pattern-recognition strengths into premium code audits. These examples prove inclusion fuels competitive edge, not charity.
“Anything less than leadership,” Dingli warned, “is digital paternalism.” He challenged governments to mandate disabled co-designers on publicly funded AI, universities to embed accessibility engineering in core curricula, and corporations to link executive bonuses to measurable inclusion. The agenda is ambitious yet practical, it requires only the will to share power.
He closed with a vivid metaphor: the AI tide is rising, ensure people with disabilities are at the helm, not waving from the dock!
