New accessibility feature coming to Firefox, an “AI powered” alt-text generator.
EDIT: the AI creates an initial description, which then receives crowdsourced additional context per-image to improve generated output. look for the “Example Output” heading in the article.
"Starting in Firefox 130, we will automatically generate an alt text and let the user validate it. So every time an image is added, we get an array of pixels we pass to the ML engine and a few seconds after, we get a string corresponding to a description of this image (see the code).
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Our alt text generator is far from perfect, but we want to take an iterative approach and improve it in the open.
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We are currently working on improving the image-to-text datasets and model with what we’ve described in this blog post…"
Alternatively, it could be very frustrating for people who need it. Computer-generated translations are often very bad compared to human ones, and image recognition adds another layer of complexity that will very likely lack nuance. It could create a false sense of accessibility with bad alt-text, and could make it more difficult to spot real alt-text if it isn’t being tagged or labeled as AI generated
i don’t think we disagree in a vacuum but bringing that up in the context of this particular thread is probably unhelpful