Human-Centered AI

Human-Centered AI (HCAI) is a design and research orientation that places human experience, context, agency, and values at the center of how AI systems are built and evaluated, rather than optimizing only for model performance. In accessibility contexts, HCAI emphasizes that AI explanations and behavior must serve the people most affected by the system, including disabled users who may have cognitive, sensory, or communication differences. Human-Centered Explainable AI (HCXAI) is a related strand, formalized in CHI workshops, that focuses specifically on making AI reasoning legible and actionable for end users rather than only for developers or domain experts. HCAI matters for accessibility because AI systems deployed in high-stakes care, education, and assistive contexts can achieve strong technical metrics while still failing the disabled people they intend to serve if those people cannot understand, calibrate trust in, or contest system outputs.