Welcoming Tlamelo Makati as a Visiting Scholar

Tlamelo Makati has joined JOPRO this fall as a Visiting Scholar in the Data x Direction program, working with the Society, Ethics, and Technology (SET) working group. She first worked with us as a Data x Direction intern in summer 2025. She returns having completed her PhD.

Tlamelo’s research sits where artificial intelligence, digital accessibility, and human-computer interaction meet. Her doctoral work at Technological University Dublin, in the Towards People Oriented Technology research centre, examined the role of AI in digital accessibility. She has published in ACM SIGACCESS and at W4A, the Web for All conference. In 2025 she presented her research framework, on inclusive AI-driven digital accessibility through multi-stakeholder participatory design, at the FAccT Doctoral Consortium in Athens, and wrote about the experience for Data x Direction.

A thread through her work is what she calls active inclusion. In a recent essay, she observes that ethical AI guidelines tend to agree on principles such as fairness and transparency while lacking the mechanisms that would make those principles hold in deployed systems. Active inclusion is her proposal for closing that gap. Inclusion becomes participatory, context-sensitive work carried through the whole AI lifecycle, from data collection and modelling to evaluation, deployment, and governance. In practice, the communities a system affects help decide how a problem is framed, what counts as success, and how the system is monitored once it is in use.

The question of who decides also runs through a publication currently under review regarding policy and assistive technology. She considers how the reward function, the choice of what a system is trained to optimise, is where “assistance” is actually defined, and that current governance frameworks rarely reach that choice. This echoes a theme in her work at large: a call for disabled people’s participation to move upstream, into deciding what these systems are rewarded for.

At JOPRO, Tlamelo will continue her work on digital accessibility and contribute to the development of various projects within the Society, Ethics, and Technology working group.

You can read more of her writing on her Substack and connect with her on LinkedIn.