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My.Alt-Text.org

Status: Alpha

This is a tool to make alt text easier.

I write a lot of alt text, and it's always struck me how useless the user interface offered by every social media site is. I wanted to build the composer I wished they had. This is a start, with these features:

What it is not, is accessible. Yet. I am an inexperienced frontend developer, and the ingredients of a modern website have inaccessibility baked in. I tried to find help pre-alpha, but had no luck, and decided that a limited release was the most likely path to folks gaining interest in the project. An alpha release means it works for the author(s), a beta has to work for everyone that wants in, and we won't go live until it's as open as possible.

This is an alpha release, things are going to break. I hope those that are able will play with it and give me feedback on GitHub or Mastodon

My.Alt-Text.org

Getting Started

There are three primary parts of the page:

Each serves an important purpose in the flow of composing alt text.

The Image

The primary purpose of the image area is displaying the image as you work on your description but it also supports Optical Character Recognition, or OCR. OCR extracts readable text from images, but it doesn't do a perfect job, and often sees random letters that aren't there in things like photographs.

In the main menu is a button that allows you to change the language being extracted.

The Work Area

The work area is below the image, and it's where you'll write descriptions. When you first open the page, no snippets will be there, you'll have to either use OCR on the image to extract text, or you can hit the ➕button on the left side to create a blank description. If it's too small, you can make it bigger by dragging the bottom right corner of the text area.

You might have a bunch of snippets, especially if you're using OCR. Once you're happy with the description(s) you've made, you can either click the 💾 on the snippet to save just one, or the one to the right will save all the current in-progress descriptions. If you don't want a snippet, you can hit 🚮 on it to delete it.

Any descriptions you save are moved into...

The Archive

The archive has two main parts, the search bar and the results. When you first open the page, the results will be closed. You can enter search terms to find and display, but keep in mind the search operates on whole words.

When you upload an image, the archive is filtered down to descriptions written for that image. If you'd like to toggle that, you can hit the 🌠 button.

If you'd like to edit an item in your archive, click its 📝 button, and it will appear in the work area. Make any changes and then hit 💾 to save them to your archive. If you want to discard the changes but keep the old version, you can just hit 🚮 in the work area.

Set Max Length on a description to get a view of it split on whitespace. If the description is too long to be attached to a single image, you can click 🌠 next to each section to get an "Alt Text Continued" image. That image will be localized if possible.