Altextify | Devpost

Inspiration

As college students, we use tools like Adobe Express often to create digital content for clubs and classes. We wanted to incorporate alt text for our designs but found that it wasn’t an option for Adobe Express. Even though other tools offer that feature, their AI generation doesn’t take into account the context of the entire design and thus often produces meaningless text. This inspired us to create an add-on that can generate meaningful alt text for content creators.

What it does

Altextify allows users to select elements on their design and write alternative text that describes the element in the context of the design. Based on best practices for alt text, we’ve restricted alt text to 125 characters. Altextify also allows users to generate alt text for the element which can be reviewed by the designer to ensure it is appropriate and accurate. Additionally, there are realtime suggestions to improve the alt text which appear when alt text is saved. The user can refer to the guidelines provided by the add-on for guidance on writing alt text based on the type of element.

How we built it

For the base add-on, we used React (TypeScript) along with Adobe SWC for the UI. We used an open-source library called double-great to provide suggestions for improving alt text. We plan to leverage existing AI technology (LLMs) and the open-source sharp library for text generation.

Challenges we ran into

We were all new to Adobe SDK and had to read a lot of documentation to understand how we could build our add-on. Additionally, we had to brainstorm many ways to use AI to generate alternative text based on the context of the entire design. We were concerned about AI hallucinations that might occur and to combat this, we decided that users need to be able to review the generated text to ensure it is appropriate.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were proud of the sleek design that we created and implemented along with the research we did to prove the technical feasibility of our add-on. Despite our tight schedules and members being in different time zones, we were proud to be able to coordinate and execute our idea.

What we learned

We learned about how important alt text is to content creators and consumers and how extensive accessibility guidelines are. This made us realize how necessary it is for Adobe to offer the ability to add alt text to its designs beyond its webpage builder for those who are visually impaired. Through research we were able to learn how to develop an add-on and the process of building and shipping a product.

What's next for Altextify

We will further develop and refine our add-on with our build plan so that alt text can be seamlessly generated and checked by the creator. Additionally, we hope to incorporate a feature where the suggestions and guidelines will pop-up when an element is selected based on the type of element (e.g. image, icon, etc.).