Inspiration This project was motivated by the desire to enhance the accessibility of project documentation. The focus was on ensuring that inline images in Markdown documents had suitable alt text. Alt text is crucial in making images accessible to individuals with visual impairments or who rely on assistive technologies by providing a textual description.
What it does The GitHub Action for suggesting Markdown alt text is a valuable resource that maintainers can choose to enable for scanning their project's codebase. Its main purpose is to detect inline images without alt text and offer appropriate descriptions for them. By incorporating this GitHub Action into their workflow, maintainers can ensure that their project documentation meets accessibility requirements.
How we built it By utilizing Azure services, we developed the GitHub Action for suggesting Markdown alt text. Azure offers an extensive selection of tools and services suitable for diverse tasks, including text analysis and image recognition. We employed Azure Cognitive Services, specifically Computer Vision, to analyse the inline image content and generate relevant alt-text suggestions to accomplish this.
The GitHub Action was created using the GitHub Actions framework, which facilitates the automation of tasks within GitHub repositories. We integrated the Azure services into the workflow of the GitHub Action, which enabled effortless scanning of Markdown documents and the creation of alt text suggestions.
Challenges we ran into We encountered several challenges during the development of the GitHub Action. One of the major hurdles was the inability to create a CLI PAT (Personal Access Token) due to app restrictions. This limitation hindered our progress in effectively integrating Azure services into the workflow. Establishing smooth communication between the GitHub repository and the Azure Cognitive Services to retrieve and analyze the necessary information became a significant obstacle.
Accomplishments that we're proud of This tool empowers maintainers to improve the accessibility of their project documentation, ensuring it becomes more inclusive and user-friendly for individuals with visual impairments.
What we learned This project provided us with valuable insights into utilizing Azure services for tasks like text analysis and image recognition. We acquired knowledge on effectively integrating external services into GitHub Actions workflows. Moreover, we enhanced our understanding of the accessibility standards and best practices associated with providing alt text for images.
What's next for Alt text suggestion Our future plans for the Alt text suggestion GitHub Action involve broadening its capabilities. We intend to explore the integration of machine learning techniques to improve the accuracy of alt-text suggestions. Additionally, we aim to enhance the flexibility and customization options available in the GitHub Action, providing maintainers with the ability to adjust scanning criteria and incorporate their own predefined alt text suggestions.
Furthermore, we will gather feedback from users and the open-source community to continuously refine and upgrade the functionality of the Alt text suggestion. Our objective is to establish it as a handy and widely adopted tool for promoting accessibility in project documentation.
Built With
- api
- yml
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