Automated Generation of Image Alternative Text Attribute Text

Abstract

Web and document accessibility is frequently impeded by missing or low-quality alternative text (“alt text”), which is descriptive information attached to an image that screen readers use to describe the content to visually impaired users. This deficiency creates a significant barrier for users who depend on screen readers to interpret visual content on webpages. This disclosure describes a method whereby a web browser or document viewer utilizes a large language model to analyze the content of an image to be displayed, for example an image to be displayed in a document. If the image is not associated with alternative text that describes the image adequately, the web browser or document viewer generates or modifies descriptive text about the image and dynamically inserts it into an image alt text attribute such as the alt text attribute within a Document Object Model (DOM), a accessibility tree, or a tag tree where it can be accessed by a screen reader. The principal objective of this technique is to improve the experience for users of assistive technologies by automatically providing meaningful descriptions for previously difficult to access visual content