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Accessibility and the agentic web

Imagine being in a department store that sells clothes from multiple brands and having a personal shopping assistant to help you select the clothes you want to buy. As a blind person, that's about the only way it's possible to go clothes shopping, independently at least, but few stores offer such a service, so you resort to shopping online.

Talking of which, it turns out that the long sleeved crew-neck jumper I found is for men... a minor detail that isn't obvious (if you use a screen reader) on the retailer's own product page! Why build a website designed to be clicked, tapped, or key-pressed, if someone can ask an agentic AI to carry out an action on their behalf with no need for any of that messy physical interaction business! Anyone who's used the likes of Meta, Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPt for more than 10 minutes will know that you don't get the same response twice even when you repeat the exact same prompt, so where does that leave the concept of representative sampling, and how can we be sure our digital products meet our legal obligations?

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