Mediagraph has released an integration with an AI tool to provide automatically generated Alternative Text. Alternative Text, or Alt Text, is an accessibility aid that describes a file. It's most important for images, illustrations, video, and other visual media. It's useful for instances where the file can't be displayed, or when a user is visually impaired and can't clearly see the file.
Alt Text is an important tool to create universally-accessible web experiences. Coupled with Mediagraph's Has Alt Text filter, this AI tool allows you to easily ensure all your media is accessible to all people. AI Alt Text Generation is currently provided by Amazon's Bedrock generative AI.
Set up AI Generated Alternative Text
- In the Manage tab, go to Site Settings.
- Open the Metadata Settings tab.
- Scroll down to the AI Generated Alternative Text section, at the bottom of the panel.
- Click the radio button to select Enabled (On Demand). We recommend starting here, so that you can test the feature and try out the default prompt. Selecting Run Automatically will generate alternative text for all new uploads.
- By default, the prompt for generation is "Generate alt text for this image in 15 words or fewer, suitable for an HTML Alt Text meta tag." Leave the prompt field blank to use this default. If you find that the generated text does not meet your requirements, you can come back to adjust this later.
- Click the blue Save button at the bottom of the page.
Pro Tip: While in Site Settings, go to the Filter Groups panel and drag and drop the Has Alt Text filter into the Admin Filter Group. Enabling this filter will allow you to easily keep track of which assets in your library have alt text once you start generating it.
Generate Alternative Text
- In the Workspace, select the asset(s) you want to submit for alt text generation.
- Click the gear icon to open the Action Menu. This is found at the top of the thumbnail grid, or in the left corner of any thumbnail.
- Click Generate Alt Text. You can also find this button in the Describe panel of the Asset Detail View. You may need to wait a moment as the image is processed.
- Once processing is complete, you can take a look at the result in the Describe panel of the Asset Detail View. Hover over the (i) next to any generated alt text to see the time of generation and the prompt used to generate it.
Please Note:
- This tool will never overwrite any existing Alt Text. This means that existing manually-written alt text will always be preserved, but it also means that you only can only generate AI Alt Text for an image once.
- You can manually edit generated text afterwards, but you cannot re-submit.
- Test this feature on demand, one file at a time, until you are sure the prompt is giving you alt text that is useful for your organization's needs.
- While AI Alt Text is pretty good, it’s generally not as good as the text written by a knowledgeable professional.
- Files that are published on a website will likely need to have Alt Text created specifically for the context and requirements of the use.
- Consult your organization's accessibility office, if applicable, before adding AI Alt Text to a large number of files.