Should I use AI tools to generate alt text?
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Alt text, also known as “alternative text” or “alt tags”, is used to describe the content of an image on a web page and is especially important for people with visual impairments who rely on screen readers to navigate the web.
Many AI tools can generate alt text these days; they analyse an image and automatically generate a description.
My experience with alt-text AI tools so far is still in the research stage, so I am not in the position to convincingly recommend any of them. But I believe there are a few tools that may be worth exploring.
Computer Vision | Microsoft Azure — azure.microsoft.com
An Azure Cognitive Service, it extracts rich information from images and analyse content with Computer Vision.
Machine Learning Image and Video Analysis — Amazon Rekognition — Amazon Web Services — aws.amazon.com
Amazon Rekognition automates image and video analysis for your applications and is easy to implement without machine learning (ML) experience.
Vision AI | Cloud Vision API | Google Cloud — cloud.google.com
Derive insights from images with AutoML Vision, use pre-trained Vision API models, or create computer vision applications with Vertex AI Vision.
These tools could be a good starting point, especially for non-native speakers and those without a wide vocabulary.
In any case, we should carefully review the alt text generated by AI to ensure its accuracy and that the information they provide is context-based.
When necessary, we should manually adjust the alt text to ensure it conveys the information of the image with clear and concise language so that most people can understand it.
