Keynote Address - Access for Agents, Inclusion for Humans

AI agents are already acting on behalf of humans. Booking flights. Comparing insurance. Completing purchases. What nobody in the accessibility space has asked yet is what that means for us.

There are two layers here that most people haven’t connected.

The first: machines are becoming customers. They don’t experience your interface the way humans do. They query APIs, parse structured data, and make decisions based on machine-readable signals. If your digital infrastructure can’t communicate with other machines, you’re invisible to a growing class of buyer.

The second: people with disabilities are increasingly delegating to AI agents and an agent acting on someone’s behalf doesn’t make access barriers disappear. It moves them upstream. What happens when that agent hits an inaccessible backend? The exclusion doesn’t end. It just becomes invisible.

This talk will change how you think about accessibility in an agentic world. Not just the interface between human and screen but the infrastructure between machine and machine, and the human who depends on that machine to act for them.