[badsectoracula]

Assistive APIs require active participation from all software - and said software to use them properly, thus it creates as many obstacles as the number of programs (or actually, UI elements) on a computer.

AI-based OCR does not, there is only a single obstacle and that is the AI OCR itself.

With the former you need every developer who ever contributed/will contribute to everything that ends up on your screen to participate properly. With the latter you only need the developers of AI OCR to participate and then it can work with anything exposed on screen regardless of if the program uses (or even can use) assistive APIs or not.

While the latter is obviously much harder, once (if) it works you get consistent results for everything and even if the results are consistently mediocre, they're better than consistently absent.

IMO even aside for things like recall etc, assistive software will be taking advantage of AI and OCR in the future so it can work regardless of what the individual programs do.