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Cover image for Generating alt text with vision AI: a genuinely useful accessibility application
PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Generating alt text with vision AI: a genuinely useful accessibility application

#vision #a11y #alttext

Generating alt text for images with a vision-language model is one of the more directly useful, low-risk applications of the technology — it genuinely helps screen-reader users, and a wrong caption is inconvenient rather than dangerous in most contexts.

What makes a generated alt text good

  • Concise and descriptive of what's actually relevant in context, not an exhaustive list of every visual element.
  • Avoids redundant phrasing like 'image of' — screen readers already announce that it's an image.
  • Flags uncertainty rather than guessing confidently on genuinely ambiguous images, where possible.

Where this fits into a student project

A browser extension or CMS plugin that auto-suggests alt text for uploaded images, with a human able to edit before publishing, is a well-scoped, genuinely useful project that also teaches the vision-language pipeline end to end.

See multimodal LLMs for student projects.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour presenting evaluation criteria — feasibility, innovation, practicality, problem solving — on a projector screen
Walking a room through evaluation criteria

Pranjul Rathour presenting BrandHive on a projector screen
Presenting BrandHive

Pranjul Rathour in a shirt and tie holding a microphone in front of a career-opportunities slide
A career session for students

Pranjul Rathour presenting with a microphone in front of a slide reading 'Now what's the conclusion?'
Presenting to a room

Pranjul Rathour on stage presenting a requirements-gathering and user-flow slide
Requirements gathering, on stage

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-11.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
Portfolio & blog · LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to

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