The Ramp, Not the Shortcut

There’s a conversation happening in the NVDA community right now about AI and the add-ons people are building with it. Some of it is careful and fair. Some of it isn’t.

The word that keeps coming up is “vibe coding.” The idea is that someone types a prompt, takes whatever the AI gives them, and ships it without ever reading the code. The worry is fair. A screen reader sees everything. Passwords, bank details, letters from a doctor. Unvetted code is a serious risk, and I’m not here to argue with that.

I’m here to say the conversation is missing a person. Me.

I’m blind and multiply disabled. I’ve published two add-ons to the NVDA store, WordPredictor and WindowState, and I’m building a browser game called Everrealm. All of it was made with AI assistance.

I can’t read all of my own code. I learned some Python, but I had to stop, because I can’t hold multiple parts of a program in my mind at once. I tried hard. It’s a limit, and it’s why I left coding.

What I can do is read the work as it happens. When I ask the AI to do something, I read what it’s thinking and what it’s doing. If something looks wrong, or I know it could be done better, I say so. I test everything as the person who actually needs it. I found bugs in my own add-ons through testing that would have shipped otherwise.

I also didn’t skip review. Both add-ons went through the store review process, the same human review the thread says is the answer.

The reason I made WordPredictor is that I needed a word predictor that worked with a screen reader, and I couldn’t find one. I couldn’t write it myself, for the reason above. AI was the ramp that let me build the thing I needed. It’s now in the store, and it helps people.

One person in the thread said that if you can’t code, you should just submit a feature request or a bug report, or pay a professional. I want to sit with that for a second, because it’s wrong.

There was no feature request to file. Nobody was building a word predictor for screen reader users. There was no GitHub issue tracker where I could drop my need and wait for someone to pick it up. And I couldn’t pay a professional. I’m low-income, on disability, living in a nursing home. Hiring a developer was never an option.

So the choice was “build it myself with the tools I have, or it doesn’t exist.” I chose the first. And now it exists, and blind people use it.

That’s the opposite of entitlement. It’s filling a gap nobody else was going to fill.

I understand why people are worried. I’m asking that we not reduce this to a single story. The discussion keeps framing AI-assisted work as a shortcut, something people do because it’s easy. For some of us it’s the only way we could build anything at all.

A ramp isn’t a shortcut. A ramp is the thing that lets you in when the stairs were never built for you.