AIcess: Breaking Media Barriers was an Erasmus+ KA152 Youth Exchange coordinated by European Youth Press (EYP), bringing together 30 young media makers from six countries — Armenia, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, and Montenegro — to explore how artificial intelligence tools can make media more accessible for people with disabilities, and to build a new generation of journalists equipped to treat accessibility as a standard, not an afterthought. The project was rooted in a clearly identified gap. Despite the rapid growth of AI-powered tools that can generate captions, transcribe audio, produce alt text, and support accessible content creation, young journalists and media creators across Europe receive little to no practical training in these tools during their education. At the same time, media accessibility remains systemically undervalued: disability-inclusive journalism is treated as a niche concern rather than a professional baseline. Young people with disabilities and those facing other barriers are consistently underrepresented both as media makers and as the subjects of media coverage. AIcess was designed to directly address this gap — by placing young people from diverse backgrounds at the centre of a practical, rights-based learning experience that bridges AI literacy, media production, and disability inclusion. The project was implemented in partnership with six organisations, each bringing specific expertise and participant communities: ONAuBiH as host and local media partner; Mladiinfo Montenegro; Youth Development Armenia; The European Correspondent; NGO The Third Sector; and ENIL Youth Network as expert disability inclusion partner. This constellation of partners ensured that the project reached young people from diverse national and socioeconomic contexts, including participants navigating significant barriers to media access and freedom of expression in their home countries. The project pursued three core objectives. The first was to empower participants with practical digital and AI accessibility skills. This meant providing hands-on experience with AI-powered tools for captioning, speech-to-text, alt text generation, and accessible content formatting — skills that participants could immediately apply in their work as journalists, bloggers, podcasters, and content creators. Alongside practical tool use, the objective included building critical digital literacy: understanding the ethical dimensions of AI, recognising algorithmic bias and its implications for inclusion, and developing the analytical skills to evaluate and challenge AI-generated content rather than simply consume it. The second objective was to foster inclusive, cross-border collaboration in media, grounded in human rights and the principles of the UNCRPD. AIcess was explicitly designed as an inclusive exchange, with 21 of the 30 main activity participants identified as facing fewer opportunities — including participants experiencing cultural differences, economic and geographical barriers, and barriers linked to discrimination, as well as one participant with a disability. The project aimed not only to include these participants but to centre their perspectives: to design a programme in which diverse experiences of access, exclusion, and media representation were treated as essential inputs to the learning process rather than as challenges to be accommodated. The involvement of ENIL Youth Network — a user-led disability rights organisation — as expert partner and HRE facilitator was central to this objective, bringing lived experience of disability directly into the facilitation of every session. The third objective was to produce and disseminate accessible media content that demonstrates in practice what youth-led, disability-inclusive journalism looks like. Participants were not only learners but creators: the exchange culminated in a full newsroom simulation in which mixed international teams planned, produced, peer-reviewed, and published accessible media pieces — articles, podcasts, videos, and newsletter content — across partner publication platforms. The goal was to generate real, public-facing outputs that model accessible journalism standards and amplify the voices and perspectives of young people with and without disabilities on issues that matter to them. Underpinning all three objectives was a commitment to the horizontal priorities of the Erasmus+ programme: inclusion and diversity, the digital dimension, and active citizenship. AIcess addressed all three simultaneously by designing an inclusive exchange experience, by making AI and digital tools central to the learning content, and by framing media participation as an act of civic engagement and rights advocacy.