Experimenting with local alt text generation in Firefox Nightly – Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog
hacks.mozilla.org
Firefox 130 will feature an on-device AI model that automatically generates alt-text for images, integrated into its built-in PDF editor.

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).

…

Our alt text generator is far from perfect, but we want to take an iterative approach and improve it in the open.

…

We are currently working on improving the image-to-text datasets and model with what we’ve described in this blog post…"

  • kbal@fedia.io
    5·
    5 months ago

    I don’t think they’re likely to do a better job than humans any time soon. We can hope that it won’t be extremely misleading too often.

    • ahal@lemmy.ca
      1·
      5 months ago

      I dunno, I suspect most human alt texts to be vague and non descriptive. I’m sure a human trying their hardest could out write an AI alt text… But I’d be pretty shocked if AI’s weren’t already better than the average alt text.