I have years of experience with this very specific tool type, AI for image description generation, including intimate watching of actual use and communication with those that rely on alt text. I am not missing this detail, I am saying that it is incorrect github.com/mozilla/checkvite…

This has the potential to send social media worldwide on a path leading to worse accessibility and less equalization of the disabled. Please think carefully about your path, and we can offer free consultation with considerable experience in this area. - [email protected]

While I wish I could lead this project toward its next steps, a major health issue has arisen that will prevent that going forward. I will be helping as I can. 💜 Hannah

I reached a final agreement with @HelloScribely today to take over the alt-text.org project. While some details can't be determined at this point, the code will remain open source, and the project will become a 501(c)(3) with Scribely's support.

I am pausing the alt-text.org project. I am not able to maintain it alone, and costs are exceeding my ability to cover, even with the help I'm receiving. The technology is there. The need is there. Right now, the resources are not. Thank you 💜

A malicious actor has been issuing calls to the backend with the intent to cost the project money. Exactly why is unclear, but for now searches will no longer OCR things. If you'd like to help cover the cost incurred so far, that would be so welcome. ko-fi.com/hbeck

We'll be deploying a major code re-organization, and the site may be down for a short time.

Hi friends, It's great to see so many new folks here, welcome! This is a heads up to everyone that's signed up that due to what appears to be a bug on Twitter's side, not all alt text you write is being saved. I'm in touch with them and will hopefully have an update soon 💜

The backend has been moved over to the new image analysis algorithm. This should result in more confidence in matches going forward, but for the time being is causing searches to be very slow. Moving to more performant hosting is next up on the task list.

Update: I just received confirmation from a contact at Twitter that the issue with sign-up on mobile is on Twitter's end, and they're working on it.

Hiring the contractor was necessary, and would not have been possible without the community's support. Thank you all so much for your patience as we get things working, and for your willingness to help us test it. Together we can make the web more accessible 💜

Updates, cont: - My research (github.com/alt-text-org/imag…) has identified a more effective image matching algorithm, and I'll be migrating things in the coming days TODO: - Get signup working on mobile - Move the backend to more performant hosting - Flesh out side pages - Misc tasks

Small round of updates: - With help from a contractor, the site is now much more responsive, and works on mobile at least in my testing - Issues with the signup process have been resolved, at least on browsers, and if you'd signed up your tweets are populating the library ...

A bit of original computer vision research conducted while building alt-text.org Searching a database of images is complicated, and it turns out the limitations faced by us are fairly novel, so we had to give multiple approaches a try. github.com/alt-text-org/imag…

I just made the API code public, with an MIT license. Take a look around 🙂 github.com/alt-text-org/api.…

The API will be down for a short time for some maintenance.

...match quality, but it does slow down searches a bit, and means that searched images are sent over the wire, though they are never saved. In addition, this will increase costs in the medium and long term, but not hugely.

The site is back up and appears to be working. I'm still investigating issues with the automatic alt text gathering, but saving via the @AltTextUtil bot works. All calculation of fuzzy matching information has been moved to the backend. This will greatly improve...

The site will be down for a bit for a major update.

A short @Patreon post about the project: patreon.com/posts/introducin… This would not be possible without all of your support 💜