Overall see nothing wrong with this. Encourages users to support alt-text more, which we should be doing for our disabled friends anyway. I really like the confirmation before applying.

The biggest problem with AI alt text is that it lacks the ability to determine and add in context, which is particularly important in social media image descriptions. But people adding useless alt text isn’t exactly a new thing either. If people treat this as a starting place for adding an alt text description and not a “click it and I don’t have to think about it” solution I’m massively in support of it.

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.

Neat. I just hope it can be disabled to save power.

Babe another pointless Al just dropped

Now i want this standalone in a commandline binary, take an image and give me a single phrase description (gut feeling says this already exists but depending on Teh Cloudz and OpenAI, not fully local on-device for non-GPU-powered computers)

When I used a similar feature in Ice Cubes (Mastodon app) it generated very detailed but ultimately useless text because it does not understand the point of the image and focuses on things that don’t matter. Could be better here but I doubt it. I prefer writing my own alt text but it’s better than nothing.

This seems like a very useful feature, and a great benefit to blind web users

From your OP description:

EDIT: the AI creates an initial description, which then receives crowdsourced additional context per-image to improve generated output. look for the “Example Output” heading in the article.

That's wrong. There is nothing crowd sourced. What you read in the article is that when you add an image in the PDF editor it can generate an alt text for the image, and you as a user validate and confirm it. That's still local PDF editing though.

The caching part is about the model dataset, which is static.

One thing I'd love to see in Firefox is a way to offload the translation engine to my local ollama server. This way I can get much better translations but still have everything private.

So, planned experimentation and availabiltiy

1. PDF editor when adding an image in Firefox 130
2. PDF reading
3. [hopefully] general web browsing

Sounds like a good plan.

Once quantized, these models can be under 200MB on disk, and run in a couple of seconds on a laptop – a big reduction compared to the gigabytes and resources an LLM requires.

While a reasonable size for Laptop and desktop, the couple of seconds time could still be a bit of a hindrance. Nevertheless, a significant unblock for blind/text users.

I wonder what it would mean for mobile. If it's an optional accessibility feature, and with today's smartphones storage space I think it can work well though.

Running inference locally with small models offers many advantages:

They list 5 positives about using local models. On a blog targeting developers, I would wish if not expect them to list the downsides and weighing of the two sides too. As it is, it's promotional material, not honest, open, fully informing descriptions.

While they go into technical details about the architecture and technical implementation, I think the negatives are noteworthy, and the weighing could be insightful for readers.

So every time an image is added, we get an array of pixels we pass to the ML engine

~~An array of pixels doesn't make sense to me. Images can have different widths, so linear data with varying sectioning content would be awful for training.~~

~~I have to assume this was a technical simplification or unintended wording mistake for the article.~~

I hope this'll be useful for me. I wonder how it compares to LLaVA?

Skimming through it it wasn't fully clear to me, is this just for their pdf editor?

But even for a simple static page there are certain types of information, like alternative text for images, that must be provided by the author to provide an understandable experience for people using assistive technology (as required by the spec)

I wonder if this includes websites that use <figcaption> with alt emptied.

There are way more companies who want to text-mine user content than there are blind people using the internet to read my content.