ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a general purpose assistant. For people using assistive technology, its most useful trick is not writing your essay for you. It is turning content you cannot easily read into a shape you can. A dense PDF becomes a bullet list. A wide table that reads as noise becomes a set of short sentences. A jargon-heavy policy becomes plain English.

It will not fix an inaccessible website and it does not replace knowing your own software. Treat it as a fast, patient assistant that never minds being asked the same question twice, and check anything factual before you rely on it.

• Let the answer finish before you read it. Responses arrive a few words at a time, and some screen readers announce the message again each time it grows. Wait for the reply to stop, then read it back with your normal reading commands.
• Ask for the shape you want. A bullet list, numbered steps or short paragraphs read far better with speech than a wide table. If it gives you a table, ask it to convert it to a list.
• Request headings. A reply broken into headed sections gives you something to jump through instead of arrowing line by line.
• Copy the answer out. Pasting a long reply into Word or Notepad puts it in an editor you already know, with your own reading and navigation commands.
• Say who you are in the prompt. Adding a line such as: I use a screen reader, so avoid tables and describe any layout in words. That changes the output more than any clever phrasing.

• The reply keeps re-reading itself. That is the streaming response updating as it arrives. Stop speech, wait a couple of seconds, then read the finished message.
• It sounds confident and is wrong. It has no way of knowing when it is guessing. Anything you would have to defend, such as a date, a price, a legal point or a citation, check at the source.
• Long chats get hard to navigate. Start a fresh conversation for a new task. A short thread is much quicker to move around than one that has run for an hour.
• It will not describe an image unless asked. Upload the picture and ask directly: describe this image in detail, including any text in it.

Students compressing a reading list into something manageable. Employees drafting the first version of an email and then editing it into their own words. Anyone handed a badly built document who needs the content out of it today rather than next week.

If you want to use it properly rather than occasionally, our training covers prompting, its limits, and where it fits alongside the tools you already run.