Artificial Intelligence and Accessibility with Joe Houghton

Welcome to Episode 122 of the Think UDL podcast: Artificial Intelligence and Accessibility with Joe Houghton. Joe Houghton is an Assistant Professor at University College Dublin Smurfit Graduate School of Business in Dublin, Ireland. He is also a prolific writer and producer of books, podcasts, and instructive videos and webinars on teaching and learning. He has recently thrown his intellect into the emerging trends in Artificial Intelligence and published his book, Applying Artificial Intelligence to Close the Accessibility Gap. I was glad to have the opportunity to write the foreword for this book and am delighted to have the chance to speak with Joe for the second time on the Think UDL podcast. If you’d like to hear our first conversation, you can listen to episode 91: Reflecting on a Starfish Difference with Joe Houghton and I will have a link to that episode in our resources section on the ThinkUDL.org website. This episode, episode 122, details some of the ideas from Joe’s book on AI and accessibility. We discuss tools that can be used to improve accessibility, the benefits and challenges of using AI to make courses and teaching more accessible, and what ethical concerns we should be aware of when using AI. And finally I ask Joe a bit about what he sees on the horizon for AI, UDL, and accessibility.