wouldn't using standard ocr be easier?
this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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Yeah, you can check and fix it, the consumer can’t
If you can get an AI to produce an actually useful description, that would be extremely interesting. However, AIs don't know what's important about an image and will fill up the description with useless information, effectively spam for the person that needs a description.
Write just a sentence, describe the thing that is important, while keeping in mind why you're even posting the image, and it's going to take less time than asking the AI.
So you posted this from mastodon? Is @Lumidaub your tag there?
"@Lumidaub" is a reference to me. The system added that because they were, technically, replying to my comment here.
Gotcha, these look so full of links on my client
Yep, same, it's a bit of a weakness of the Fediverse imho.
For those that need it, any description is better than none.
True and one sentence written by a human who understands the image is better than twenty sentences by a word prediction machine.
No matter how good human written descriptions are, people just won't do them. So having a automated system is much more preferable.
You do realize that would lead to people (humans) doing the descriptions even less?
I would argue that it might even increase the number of descriptions if they're auto generated. People would find it easier to fix small issues than write a whole one from scratch.
It would increase the number of bad descriptions and desincentivize people to add good descriptions or (depending on the interface/permissions; you are assuming I could just manually go and fix someone else's alt-info in their image) submit fixes and corrections. And it would kill the environment even more anyway.
Sure. I don't care enough to argue. I'm not going to be the one who implements this system anyway, lol.
I know what you're saying but I truly think for most people it's simply that they're overthinking it. They think every single thing needs to be in the description, with references explained and sourced and whatnot. That does sound exhausting. And I have written a handful of descriptions like that for pictures where I thought the details were interesting enough to justify the effort. But really, a simple "The thirteenth Doctor and Rose Tyler embracing and deeply kissing" is already very sufficient in most cases (add "standing on an asteroid in front of a field of glittering stars - digital colour painting" if you have the spoons). So imho it's better to educate them and encourage short, concise descriptions than to give in to the slop.
Yeah, apart from the fact that I imagine that people who need alt text don’t appreciate LLM output. It‘s very boring. It’s either extremely technical and ice-cold or so cringe that you have to stop reading. Just what I think.
At least for me, if I realize that I’m reading an AI blog article or AI generated text in some other form, I don’t read it.
personally, this is the kind of laser focused tooling its good for. LLMs are going to be critical to assisting the disabled in many contexts.
I'd ask someone who needs these transcriptions first. I tend more towards "Nay". I mean if they want AI transcriptions, I guess they could just run their own AI. And that way they get to choose between human and AI ones. I'm kind of against flooding the internet with AI content as long as the recipients can do it themselves.
That's a good point but wouldn't it be preferable to have one AI run one time instead of several of them doing the work again and again?
(Assuming that we're even okay with AI generated descriptions in the first place which I'm not for reasons I've laid out in my other comments but I'm talking hypothetically)
Alternatively, it’s built into the platform. So when someone uploads an image to Lemmy a local AI model does the description.
Edit: Then it could even be marked as AI generated and people could choose to be exposed to it or not.
Really hard to tell. I mean there are situations in which people think they're doing someone a favour. But they're really not. Upside of doing it individually is: affected people get to pick the model they like best. And they can prompt it however they like. Depends a bit on your expertise on the matter if your pre-generated stuff is on the same level or more a disservice. Upside of pre-generating it once is: maybe a bit less CO2 in the atmosphere and a few less trees killed. But that certainly depends on how many people read those descriptions. If there's just 2 people with screenreaders out there, who don't even click on all the images, you might very well be wasting compute. And have a negative balance on the environment.
In my opinion, no. It has to be heavily curated. You’re not saving yourself a lot of work if you have to read it word by word (and probably correct stuff) anyway.
I think just one very short sentence describing what’s on there (it doesn’t have to be detailed) is a lot better than whatever an LLM will give you.
It depends a lot on the image. Multi panel comics have pretty long alt texts and AI can make it faster to reproduce the text in tge image.
But then you’re primarily extracting text, which you don’t need LLMs for. OCR tools will do the job much cheaper and more effective.
and AI can make it faster to reproduce the text in tge image
That was solved decades ago without AI. It's called OCR.
Check your output as it may be less accurate than your effort.
AI is able to extensively describe a photo, like these published on !pics@lemmy.world , but fails at seeing, what part of it is actually important, or recognising a point of a meme. It will save you many keystrokes, but probably will still need to be manually corrected.
Imo it's a good use. But do make sure you read the outputs throughly. Even hand-made OCR tools can go crazy some times. Also if the AI can be fully offline / self-hosted, that's even better imo.
AI is great for this. We shouldn't put people with disabilities at a disadvantage because of the anti-AI hysteria.
Personally "AI" is a slur for profit-driven generative bs. The concept it's based on is great. I love pattern recognition and all the possible usecases for Machine Learning when it comes to science, material research, ...
tl;dr: Go for it.
If you can run it your computer for a job that you would do anyway, I don't see why not
By transcribing, do you mean describing what is in a picture, or transcribing text in a picture?
For the former, I can't really imagine an image you couldn't describe for accessibility within a sentence, and for the latter, OCR could do the job equally well.
I'm not saying this to just push the view that neural networks are no good for anything btw. For translation, for example, or text to speech/speech to text, I genuinely think they're a revelation, and they need very little compute to perform those functions.
I'd say go ahead but make sure it produces accurate enough results and make sure to add something like [AI Transcribed] in front so people can take the potential for additional errors into consideration when reading it.
Also, if you're using an online service make sure you're using something that doesn't use it as training data. Many (probably almost all) artists / photographers won't appreciate that.
Give it a test and see how accurate it is, if it's good enough then go ahead. People have been using AI-based OCR for literal decades already, nothing has fundamentally changed. There's just a sudden moral panic about it lately.
Do not.
Please just don't.
People (hi I'm people) need what the image IS, what's important about it, why you included it. Not just what some slop generator shat out about it.
Better to have nothing, which is at least honest, than to have something that PURPORTS to have meaning but then just, doesn't.
-- Frost
You have a unique advantage in using AI for this over a vision impaired person. That being that if the generated text is wrong, you know and can correct it.
Using AI for
no
I find it tiring
The problem with disabled people isn't the disability, it's the behaviour of non-disabled people putting them under, willingly or not. You being tired of that ir actively putting them under. Yes, it's tiring to take care of people, it's work. There's no goind around that. Treating people as equals requires taking care of them, and until you take that as normal (just like brushing your teeth or doind the laundry or sweeping the floor at your place is work, but you still do it) you will be belittling them.
The change needs to happen on your side, on your conception of humanity and society. AI is not going to help you
Yeah, but you can't preemptively take care of everyone. For example, satisfactorys arachnophobia mode wouldnt exist if it wasnt for the fact that one of the devs couldn't work on it otherwise.
Time and effort are a limited resource.
There is a huge difference between not taking care because it's not important to you, and not taking care because you can't. It's a cop out to mix up both.
It's completely ok to acknowledge that you can't do it, and to ask around for others to relay you. That's society at work doing good things for all of us, and that's how we get out of all this mess. It's perfectly fine !
I read this disgraceful comment yesterday, and I've dug through my history to reply to it today.
@rako, this unacceptable. Let's remove the mention of AI to see if you can get some perspective... Imagine this exchange:
P1: I've been cooking for the homeless but it's taking up a lot of my time and energy. Is it ok to use shop-bought meals?
P2: You being weary of cooking is belittling the homeless! People like you are what's wrong with society.
I hope you can agree that this is unfair, and unhinged. It's also not mischaracterising what you wrote.
@Gonzako you don't seem to have minded rako trying to shame you, but they were way out of line.
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I think that technology can really help us here. OCR on images is mostly solved. If you know what PaddleOCR can do, those people on Mastodon who are whining about others not including an image description for a screenshot seem really annoying. It is possible to do this directly on your computer without any costs, without the need for beefy hardware. So no need to try to force everyone else to include transcriptions for screenshot, no need to attack other people, just do it yourself and enjoy the text on the screenshot. Technology can really help us here.
This also does kind of apply to AI image descriptions. Try it and put an image into Gemini and ask it to describe it. You will be surprised. AI can totally give you a workable description of an image. The problem here is that those AI tools can get quite expensive when you are using them a lot and that many disabled people do not have much money. So in my opinion it totally is ok to include AI image descriptions.
I think that there are too many people in the fediverse who do not know the current state of the technology and hate AI for maybe the right reasons, but who are missing out how it could help them.
*yea or nay
If I were blind I'd prefer it if the app just hid all image posts from me. The alt text, when it exists, is going to be trash most of the time anyway.
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