The Consortium

a13i is built to outgrow its founder. The goal is a vendor-neutral body where developers, companies, researchers, and disabled advocates maintain a shared evidence base for AI and accessible interfaces.

What membership means, what the Technical Steering Committee owns, and how name stewardship transfers as the project matures is specified in the repository’s GOVERNANCE.md. The short version:

• Organizations join by contributing experiments, replication work, engineering time, or funding, and by committing publicly to the manifesto.
• The consortium complements existing bodies. W3C WAI is the standards venue, Teach Access is the skills venue, AIxDisability is the community literacy venue. a13i is the developer-facing evidence and practice venue, and it feeds the others rather than competing with them.
• Disabled leadership is a structural goal. Contributions about disabled people’s experience must cite or involve disabled people, and consortium governance is expected to include disabled members before it includes a second vendor.

Founding implementation

The consortium’s founding implementation is The Blind Computer (theblindcomputer.com), a voice computer that opens the Accessibility AI driven internet to blind users: a person calls, speaks, and an AI does the seeing. It is the first tool built on a13i modalities and the working proof that the discipline holds end to end. It is also one tool, for one community. The consortium exists because the surface it scratches is enormous: every modality in this guide can power tools for every group accessibility serves, built by anyone.

To start contributing today, see CONTRIBUTING.md.