Researching AI’s role in supporting access consulting.
Written by Cathryn Grant, Access Leader Victoria
Whilst some of us are worrying about the impact of AI on our jobs, Architecture & Access is taking a thoughtful, hands-on approach—exploring how AI can elevate and strengthen our work.
Through the Australian Postgraduate Research Internship program, Architecture & Access has engaged PhD candidate Mat Tuebert to explore how large language models and building information modelling can automate some of the tasks involved in access consulting.
Whilst in the early stages of this work, Mat has identified approximately 60 relevant articles in published academic literature. There has been a significant increase in articles published in the last 4 years with most articles being written by researchers based in the USA. Key themes include new ways of working with AI to automate and detect accessibility issues, the use of virtual reality by people with disability to pre-empt environmental accessibility issues and the detection of disability by AI in the built environment which may trigger automatic or human assistance.
Mat has currently taken a break to work on his own PhD research at Monash University – Emerging Technologies Research Lab, which aims to explore how work, disability and AI can interact with each other to advance societal access and inclusion of people with disabilities. Mat will return to Architecture & Access later this year to finalise the work he has started with us.
And of course, in preparing this article I asked Co-pilot how AI will do the role of an access consultant and the short answer was:
AI is unlikely to replace access consultants, but it may support the role by automating technical tasks and increasing the importance of human judgement and expertise.
That doesn’t make me too worried (yet), and yes, case in point, I’m happy to say I did not require AI to write this article…
