Hello, I'm here to seek out a community of other #Disabled people and accomplices.
I'm working to build a non-profit tool to make alt text easier, and I want to connect with folks who can help guide that project toward a useful start.
I've built a proof of concept, but getting it further will take building community. I'm #Autistic, and networking does not come easy to me. Boosting this is an immense help.
More information at https://alt-text.org
@hannah @geographile PS: The ALT4Me info was primarily aimed at @geographile & anyone else in a similar situation
I know who you are from your great work at Twitter, Hannah! Many a day I was rate limited because I had invoked the alt text util bot too many times!
Two instances that might be of interest to you are:
https://disabled.social/
https://kind.social/
@hannah
Hi, tell us more about this.
Unfortunately the site is on Google servers, and we block Google.
@dsfgs Yes, I'm afraid GCP is what I'm familiar with from work, and so it's where I hosted things.
The idea is a library of alt text, keyed by image, offering a public API for usage in a variety of ways. I designed and built the proof of concept alone, and like any proof of concept it set aside some questions, so first priority of the next iteration is getting more input from potential users about usage and other considerations.
Happy to dive into more detail if you'd like.
@hannah Hi ! I like the initiative, but I have a lot of questions, and I didn't find a page that would explain them.
@MarcBrillault The details are intentionally a little vague on that first page, because one of the first steps is revisiting design decisions made when building the proof of concept.
As for the system as it stands:
- Texts are keyed by a SHA256 hash of the image pixels, w/ additional fuzzy matching using an algorithm here: https://github.com/alt-text-org/image-algo-testing
- As it stands it will only be able to examine the first frame of animated images
- It supports multiple texts, same lang, tagged with their lang.
@hannah Thanks for your answers.
If I understand well, there will be no possibilities to have several different texts per language ?
If that is so, I feel this will be a problem, alt the same image can be used in several contexts, even memes. Do I want to use an image of the office because of the character, what is said, or the face's expression ? Do I want to speak about the actor ? their outfit ?
It would be irrelevant to list all of those, so having a choice between several possible alts would be better.
And that opens lots of questions, like "how will the alt texts be presented ?" "How can we manage to limit the number of possible alt texts for one image ?"
I've thought a lot about this myself, and never found the willpower to do something for now.
@MarcBrillault The system as it stands stores text keyed by (image_hash, user_id, lang), so while a single user couldn't store multiple texts for the same (image_hash, lang), there could be multiple texts available for that image. It's not perfect, but it was good enough for a proof of concept.
I have possible answers for your questions, and so far I've spent a lot of time thinking about all of them, but one of my core goals is re-exploring the design decisions I made without discussion.
@hannah it’d be wonderful if alt-text could be translated with ease from other languages into one’s own language
For me, I’d find that useful for foreign-language cartoons which might have the speech bubble text in each frame in a language I don’t understand, I’d be able to understand and enjoy the cartoon
@ajeremias The needs are less simple than just needing hosting. Some of the technologies the proof of concept relied upon in GCP don't have a 1:1 option elsewhere, among other issues.
Given the set of functionality that's needed and likely too resource-intensive to build for a small team, we're tied to some cloud provider. I'm not excited to work with any of them.
@ajeremias Sure, off the top of my head this has two major reliances on GCP:
1. Backend DB - We need a horizontally scalable backend database that supports multiple indices on a single table. Maintaining that is hard, and it goes 0-100 as far as cost to host yourself.
2. Rate Limiting - We'll need some fairly tight rate limiting to constrain abuse. Building that is *hard*
Aside from those there are also other places where I just don't think we'll have the support to build it ourselves.
@hannah
(Possibly you already thought of this.)
- this has user-submitted content being spread to an amplified audience. It's going to need active moderation (that scales with its use) and can't be just a passive programmatically-automated tool.
- alt-text is contextual, to its use and to its audience. It will probably need to have multiple options present for selection.
... but maybe not if social media use in particular is the goal, like if you're doing a webpage/news story you're putting in enough effort that alt-text-ing it yourself isn't significantly more?
... but maybe still, people use things differently in social media, there isn't always one single use of an image.
... but maybe there's a notably Most Common use.
(... but should the fact that an image can get used in multiple languages be considered?)
@hannah Like, you can ban slurs/censored versions of slurs ("k*ke", e.g.) algorithmically, sure -- which might limit the category of images you can provide the service for, like some images do legitimate contain slurs and are shared and described in detail for e.g. documenting hate-speech, but it's reasonable to just say "that's out of scope because it's too sensitive, people will need to alt-text this themselves" --
but more to the point, you can neither ban (e.g., these are examples and not trying to be a full or equal list) pictures of black people or pictures of Jews, nor ban the words "gorilla" or "vermain".
There will need to be at some level manual moderation against that.
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