 I've been thinking a lot about alt text recently. People don't write alt text as often as they should. And when they do, most people are awful at it. I think this is one of the single best applications for some multi-modal LLM to step in and write alt text for you. 10 comments
 @samhenrigold i kinda feel like education is a big thing here… people are awful at it because very few people know what good alt text reads like. feels like an opportunity to guide / teach people — in context — vs glossing over it and making it happen in the background without people thinking about it… (and then fall back to machine generated / community suggested alt text if the author intentionally skips it) @edwellbrook Agreed. For an upcoming Mastodon app update, I've added a dialog that sheds some additional info and tips for alt text. Nothing groundbreaking but a worthwhile first step imo @ovmoro And, ya know, give that model a little nudge in the right direction. ``` @samhenrigold lol, there are def some worse ways to start a descriptor. But yeah, at the very least "a photo of", "a drawing of", and "a screenshot of" need to rank higher than just "it's a picture" XP @samhenrigold my suggestion would be that you could propose alt texts for others as a Mastodon feature. Either for images with no text or bad text. As an author, you could accept the proposal and it would edit the post. |
Gregory's Server
I think there was a part in Google IO that demoed something like this. "Coming later". But the state of affairs *today* is tragic.
Open the instagram app, turn on a screen reader, and listen to the dog shit generated alt text. It just lists out the number of people and objects in the photo. "May be a meme of 2 people. Bath robe, laundry basket, and text."