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I'm Sorry, but I Can't Help with Braille: Revealing Accessibility Failures in State-of-the-Art LLMs

Summary

A study evaluating state-of-the-art LLMs on Korean-Braille translation finds poor, unstable outputs and weak human agreement. Fine-tuning a small T5-small model yields large gains, revealing systematic limitations in current LLMs for accessibility-critical modalities.

SourcearXiv Computational LinguisticsAuthor: Abdullah Abdullah
I'm Sorry, but I Can't Help with Braille: Revealing Accessibility Failures in State-of-the-Art LLMs
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[Submitted on 7 May 2026]

Title:I'm Sorry, but I Can't Help with Braille: Revealing Accessibility Failures in State-of-the-Art LLMs

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Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) perform strongly on many language tasks, but their capability in structurally constrained, accessibility-critical modalities such as Braille remains unclear. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on bidirectional Korean-Braille translation using a human-annotated dataset. Despite expectations that multilingual, instruction-tuned models can generalize to Braille via text representations, we find consistently poor, unstable outputs and substantial disagreement with human judgments. These results point to missing Braille-aware tokenization and weak alignment between Korean and Braille patterns. In contrast, supervised fine-tuning of a small model (T5-small) on the same data yields large and stable gains over zero-shot and prompted LLM baselines across standard metrics (SacreBLEU, ChrF++, CER, BLEU, ROUGE-L, METEOR, CIDEr). Our findings reveal a systematic limitation of current LLMs and demonstrate the effectiveness of modest task-specific supervision.

Comments: Accepted at the LTEDI Workshop at ACL 2026

Subjects:

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

Cite as: arXiv:2607.11893 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2607.11893v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.11893

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Abdullah Abdullah [view email] [v1] Thu, 7 May 2026 03:29:17 UTC (584 KB)

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Key points and analysis

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Key points

  • LLMs perform poorly on Korean-Braille translation, with unstable outputs and low human agreement.
  • Issues include missing Braille-aware tokenization and weak alignment between Korean and Braille patterns.
  • Fine-tuning a small T5-small model outperforms zero-shot and prompted LLMs across all metrics.
  • Findings highlight systematic limitations of current LLMs for accessibility tasks.

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.