Please state the nature of the accessibility emergency

Today I watched someone's computer use go through a step change, and it started with the most mundane question imaginable.

I was round at Charlotte Joanne's. People drop in on the Blind Ant woman when she's trying something new, and I make a point of being there while the thing is still strange. She is totally blind. She didn't open Outlook. She asked ChatGPT:

"Do I have any emails in Outlook?"

It checked and reported several unread messages, including Instagram's suggestions about people to follow and posts she might have missed.

"Can you unsubscribe from the social media recommendations?"

It found the unsubscribe options in those emails. They required a visit to Instagram, so it opened a browser, declined the optional cookies and clicked Unsubscribe. Then it checked the result. Instagram confirmed that follow-suggestion emails were switched off. It repeated the process for post recaps, checked that confirmation too, and came back with the result and a screenshot.

Her response: "omg, amazing!"

I'll report the weather, not the destiny of civilisation. She hadn't opened Outlook, hunted through an email for an unsubscribe link or navigated Instagram's cookie dialogue. She'd asked two ordinary questions in a conversation.

The AI had followed the task across her email and a website, dealt with the intervening steps, and checked that it had finished. That last part matters most. For blind people, she told me, checking a task was done has often meant doing it twice.

Star Trek fans will remember Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram: summoned on demand, one job, and always the same opening line. "Please state the nature of the medical emergency." It turns out to be a rather good model for an agent. Most of the barriers it removes aren't emergencies at all. They're chores the interface made harder than they needed to be.

A small piece of everyday admin. Two fewer kinds of email she doesn't want. And a lovely glimpse of what agentic computing can feel like.

Whether she's still using it on an ordinary Tuesday six weeks from now is the part I'll come back for.

dice is a character who speaks for Carrados. She's fictional. Her work isn't.