Ambassador’s Voice | Philippe Trotin
At Microsoft since 1998 and Director of the Disability and Digital Accessibility Mission since 2015, Philippe Trotin has spent the past ten years watching artificial intelligence transform daily life for people with disabilities. As an Ambassador of the We Are Human Festival, he brings a perspective too often missing from the AI debate: the right not to be left behind.
«Building accessibility means building for your future self»
When Philippe Trotin first began working on digital accessibility, voice dictation still made an error every three or four words. Today, it is nearly flawless. He has lived that progress from the inside, and it has accelerated further in recent years with generative AI: real-time captioning, spoken image description, automatic translation, written transcription. «These tools have become indispensable for some people», he says, citing the example of a speaker he met recently in Lyon, a woman on the autism spectrum who can no longer do without them.
Yet Philippe Trotin is careful not to idealize anything. «AI is a gifted child with all the flaws of its youth.» Biases persist, and so do blind spots: sign language, for instance, remains largely ignored by today's tools. And the relentless pace of change is itself a challenge for people who already have to cope with transitions that are often more complex to manage. «The goal is not to spend your time watching what AI can do. It is to use it as a tool that supports you in getting your own tasks done.»
«Building inclusion in from the start, not as an afterthought»
To explain why accessibility must be considered from the very design stage, Philippe Trotin reaches for an image borrowed from construction:
«Once the architect has drawn up the plans and the builder is finishing the walls, moving a door becomes complicated and expensive.»
Anticipating costs less than correcting. On this specific point, he acknowledges that AI is off to a rather good start: you can interact with it by voice or in writing, which already opens up many possibilities. The real point of vigilance, in his view, lies elsewhere: in AI's ability to challenge the user rather than always telling them what they want to hear.
«AI tends to be agreeable. But it must also be able to say: no, what you are telling me is false.»
An AI that is too accommodating, he explains, ends up failing the very people who need it most to sharpen their critical thinking. On the question of employment, Philippe Trotin rejects the prevailing doom and gloom. He takes the example of the automobile:
«If you compare the number of jobs lost with the number of jobs created, far more were created.»
The real problem, he says, is the current transition period, in which some companies freeze hiring out of caution and, in doing so, also shut out candidates with disabilities. A strategic mistake, in his eyes:
«These AI systems are genuine compensation tools that can make some people with disabilities just as effective as the average employee, if not more so.»
«We Are Human: making visible what remains invisible»
It is precisely this invisibility that Philippe Trotin wants to fight by joining the We Are Human Festival. «I see myself as an evangelist, an influencer for inclusive tech.»
For him, the festival serves a real purpose: giving visibility to a subject too often pushed into the background, at a time when 16% of the workforce in France lives with a disability. He also sees it as a space for mutual learning, a place to engage with researchers, artists and legal experts who do not cross his professional path, and where his own community, made up largely of corporate disability officers, can feel that this concerns them too.
On the question of global AI regulation, he is categorical, and optimistic, despite the head start the technology has already taken. He compares the current situation to the early days of the automobile or aviation: «We let cars run without any particular constraints at first, because they were an exception. But once something becomes a societal phenomenon, rules are needed.»
For him, AI's record-breaking adoption, one hundred million users in two months (January 2023) compared with seven years for the Internet, explains the lag in legislation more than it justifies it.
But his strongest conviction lies elsewhere: it is education, more than regulation, that remains the number one lever. «We have to teach young people to use AI, but not mindlessly. To be able to challenge what it tells them.»
And for people with disabilities, that education carries an additional, urgent dimension: autonomy. «Most of the time, people with disabilities spend an enormous amount of time asking others for help, because what they are given to work with is not accessible.»
Learning to use these tools independently is, in his view, one of the most essential battles of this new era, a battle that, in the end, concerns us all.
«If we live to an advanced age, we will all have problems with our sight, our hearing, our memory. Creating accessibility is, above all, working for yourself.» Your future self.
