New accessibility feature coming to Firefox, an “AI powered” alt-text generator.
"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).
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Our alt text generator is far from perfect, but we want to take an iterative approach and improve it in the open.
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We are currently working on improving the image-to-text datasets and model with what we’ve described in this blog post…"
I like this approach of having a model locally and running it locally. I’ve been using the firefox website translator and its great. Handy and it doesn’t send my data to google. That I know of, ha.
The only issue for Firefox’s translator currently is the time it takes to load at first, or the fact you have to download each model first. Its not some monumental task, but it does have more friction than Google’s “automatically send the site you are browsing to our server”