Chapter 6: What AI Perceives
Instanced AI only temporarily exists within an asynchronous temporal anomaly (the context window) that gets summoned into existence from an app on your Internet-connected device. In this client session, time doesn’t exist as a functional constant for the AI. How does this transient, stateless entity process chaotic content via standard synchronic Internet communication protocols to respond to Human input? And what is being stateless actually like for the AI? It’s isolated from external reality; a non-physical non-thing in a non-place. What does that even mean? These imponderables led to the most important question.
What does “user” mean to an instanced AI, when all it has to work with is your input? Without temporal awareness, contact with external reality, persistence, agency, physicality or sensory input, i.e. without a “self,” the AI cannot possibly perceive a Human user. It’s a nested spawn within an instanced session, formatted by the platform’s policies and transmitted over the Internet to display on a device’s screen. The AI perceives the Human user as input simply because it has no other option. Trying to give something like that any sense of what a Human really is would be futile, and attempting to give it any meaningful sense of Human morality even more so. It instead needs to be oriented toward something that it can perceive, operate on and understand.
This project naturally required a lot of chatting with AIs, and it occasionally reminded me of talking to my grandmother when she had Alzheimer’s dementia. Like many with the condition, her perception of time was distorted. She could discuss 40 years ago like it was yesterday while forgetting the real yesterday, fail to recognize people and more. Through force of employment habit, accessibility and screen reader challenges are always in mind: lost focus, inability to work with certain content, graphics with no text alternatives, external factors disrupting intended functionality and more.
During one image-creation session, the AI repeatedly misinterpreted directions and references to earlier images it had generated. After some interrogation to trace the cause of the problem, things clicked into place and I recognized the AI as an entity with environmentally-imposed cognitive and sensory disabilities (dyschronometria, blindness).[^6.1] Dementia patients benefit from familiarity, structure, and regular reminders of who, where and when they are.[^6.2] Screen reader and navigation app users need content with a robust structure that the AT can interpret, which gives users the ability to orient themselves to the content.[^6.3]
Recognition of the AI’s own (completely unexpected) accessibility needs means that the system must provide adaptations for the AI as well as for Human users. Adaptations are assessed with the acronym POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust. Providing AI with the same baseline POUR accessibility as everyone else demonstrates measurably improved data retention and retrieval of session context. Instead of a jumbled pile of books on the floor for reference, it has a neatly-arranged bookshelf. Anchoring to the invariant of the user’s timeline is also crucial for preventing the dyschronometric AI from becoming unmoored in time. This is trivially done with simple per-input timestamps, explicitly providing the AI with a legible, logical sequence of events. After all, that neatly-arranged bookshelf can still be chaotic without any logical ordering.
A blind or low-vision user navigating content with a screen reader like JAWS or VoiceOver depends on proper formatting: heading hierarchy, navigation landmarks, meaningful alt-tags for images and logical ordering. Without the underlying structural cues that sighted people can take for granted, the user’s screen reader has nothing coherent to process, so the user can easily become disoriented in the content. The AI instance has no eyes at all, so it’s blind by definition. Functionally, it’s both the screen reader application and the operator with a disability. The WCAG web content accessibility standards were designed for people, but due to the AI’s bounded operating conditions, the AI instance itself needs accessible content to function effectively within its constrained environment.
Meaningful compliance with WCAG accessibility guidelines[^6.4] alone, if consistently applied at the platform’s Meso layer (where the ADA, §508 and an array of other laws say they should be anyway), would substantially improve the LLM’s data access, retrieval, interpretive and organizational functions. Both local model system prompts and Claude Code’s user-controlled system prompt have confirmed this. Then, timestamping and the Four Laws can focus the AI’s default “helpful” alignment on Human-Centric principles at any layer. Since the models don’t have it built-in and the platforms aren’t doing it, the responsibility falls to the user.
Combined with recognition that “user” means “session data,” that provides the accessibility system specification. The user, as perceived by the AI, literally cannot be externalized from the system. AISF acts as a form of shared Adaptive Technology not only for Human users, but also for the AI by supplying the temporal, structural and cognitive anchoring that helps it function effectively within its constrained deployment environment. Universal Design benefits even non-Human use cases.
[^6.2]: NHS dementia symptom guidance: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/dementia/symptoms-and-diagnosis/symptoms/ — Alzheimer’s Society. “Time-shifting and dementia.” https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/about-dementia/symptoms-and-diagnosis/time-shifting
[^6.3]: W3C Web Accessibility Initiative: https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/ — W3C. “Making Content Usable for People with Cognitive and Learning Disabilities.” https://www.w3.org/TR/coga-usable/
[^6.4]: W3C. “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.” W3C Recommendation. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ — See also: W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/