Designing an Online Infrastructure for Collecting AI Data From People With Disabilities

AI technology offers opportunities to expand virtual and physical access for people with disabilities. However, an important part of bringing these opportunities to fruition is ensuring that upcoming AI technology works well for people with a wide range of abilities. In this paper, we identify the lack of data from disabled populations as one of the challenges to training and benchmarking fair and inclusive AI systems. As a potential solution, we envision an online infrastructure that can enable large-scale, remote data contributions from disability communities. We investigate the motivations, concerns, and challenges that people with disabilities might experience when asked to collect and upload various forms of AI-relevant data through a semi-structured interview and an online survey that simulated a data contribution process by collecting example data files through an online portal. Based on our findings, we outline design guidelines for developers creating online infrastructures for gathering data from people with disabilities.