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Accessibility has always played catch-up to the detriment of people with disabilities - and this appears to be exacerbated by the rapid advancements in technology. A key question becomes, can we better predict where technology will be in 10 or 20 years and develop a plan to be better positioned to make these new technologies accessible when they make it to market? To attempt to address this question, a “Future of Interface Workshop” was convened in February 2023, chaired by Vinton Cerf and Gregg Vanderheiden that brought together leading researchers in artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, computer vision, and VR/AR/XR, and disability to both a) identify barriers these new technologies might present and how to address them, and b) how these new technologies might be tapped to address current un- or under-addressed problems and populations. This paper provides an overview of the results of the workshop as well as the current version of the R&D Agenda work that was initiated at the conference. It will also present an alternate approach to accessibility that is being proposed based on the new emerging technologies 

Most programmers rely on visual tools (block-based editors, auto-indentation, bracket matching, syntax highlighting, etc.), which are inaccessible to visually-impaired programmers. While prior language-specific, downloadable tools have demonstrated benefits for the visually-impaired, we lack language-independent, cloud-based tools, both of which are critically needed. We present a new toolkit for building fully-accessible, browser-based programming environments for multiple languages. Given a parser that meets certain specifications, this toolkit will generate a block editor familiar to sighted users that also communicates the structure of a program using spoken descriptions, and allows for navigation using standard (accessible) keyboard shortcuts. This paper presents the toolkit and a first evaluation of it. While the toolkit allows for full editing of code, we chose to focus strictly on navigation for this evaluation, using the navigation-only study design of Baker, Milne and Ladner. Visually-impaired programmers completed several tasks with and without our tool, and we compared their results and experience. Users had improved accuracy when completing tasks, were significantly better able to orient when reading code, and felt better about completing the tasks when using the tool. Moreover, these improvements came with no significant change in task completion time over plain text, even for experienced programmers who navigate text using screen readers set to high words-per-minutes.