Toward Better, Proactive, Adaptable and Symbiotic Conversational Agents for Digital Accessibility

Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds significant promise for promoting digital inclusion, offering natural language access to information and services for citizens who face barriers with traditional, visually oriented web interfaces. Yet current chatbots often stop at retrieving or displaying content, providing little support for interpretation, comparison, or decision-making. This position paper, developed within the context of the PROTECT project (imPROving ciTizEn inClusivity Through Conversational AI), argues that future conversational agents must go beyond basic information delivery to become better, proactive, and symbiotic. Building on recent work on Explanation User Interfaces (XUIs) and Human-Centered AI, we explore how explanations can be integrated into dialogue to foster trust, transparency, and collaboration. We outline opportunities for conversational explanation interfaces (ConvXUIs), identify research challenges-including evaluation metrics, cognitive load, personalization, integration with web architectures, and ethical regulation-and discuss how symbiotic interaction can empower users as active participants in digital life. By advancing conversational agents that explain, justify, and co-construct meaning, we envision a path toward more inclusive, trustworthy, and effective digital accessibility.