Overview

alternat is a collection of open-source toolsets with the ambition of lowering the barrier of adopting accessibility solutions. alternat helps to generate default intelligible alternative text for images in websites.

Based on our experience, just adding alt-text is not a complete solution but collecting images to be annotated is a big part of the task. Keeping in mind above two requirements the current version of alternat offers two features:

  • Collect images from a website

  • Generate recommended alternative text

Why alternat

70% of the sites are inaccessible and the inaccessibility is causing a loss of 7 billion every year. In spite of availability of accessibility standards for long and tools to point out where you are falling short, there is a shortage of solutions which allow you to implement them with ease. One of these areas is – Alternate Text (alt text).

The alt-text attribute of image tag in html is supposed to make images in websites accessible. But in practice, one doesn’t see it meaningfully implemented. Someone has to go through all the images in question and craft a corresponding alt text based on context. The investment to do it can become high and it could take time to author the content.

What if there is a library, which can be integrated in your projects, that provides a recommended alt text for a given image, which can be either passed on as is or as a recommendation to a reviewer? alternat just does that.