This week, the MasterWP team launched EveryAlt, a new AI-powered tool that intantly generates accurate alt text for all your images. Our senior developer, Andrea Vitale, chatted with Doc Pop on the Torque Social Hour about the new project.
Doc Pop:
Hello and welcome to the Torque Social Hour, a weekly live stream of WordPress news and events. My name is Doc and I’m a contributor at torquemag.io, which is a resource for podcasts like this live streams as well as tutorials, tunes, and all sorts of WordPress News. So go to torquemag.io to check out more episodes of the social hour and of Press This. Today I am joined by Andrea Vitale, a web developer at HDC who is working on a new plugin, a new WordPress plugin called EveryAlt. Andrea, how are you doing today?
Andrea Vitale:
Great, thank you, Doc.
Doc Pop:
Yeah, thanks for joining me. So EveryAlt is a brand new plugin. I actually installed it yesterday, I think it was yesterday, the launch day for it?
Andrea Vitale:
Yeah, we launched it yesterday morning and we are quite happy with the results so far.
Doc Pop:
And as I understand this is, it’s a project that HDC that I know Rob has been kind of interested in working in AI and WordPress. He sees a lot of kind of potential here. And this is the first project you all have launched. And how long did you all work on this project before launch day yesterday
Andrea Vitale:
We work around about a month.
Doc Pop:
A month?
Andrea Vitale:
Yeah. So before doing this we did different things, always using the same technology and then we decide, okay, it could work. Let’s focus on the Alt text images for now. So EveryAlt we took one month, but before what was more studying and more testing or other things that could be done with AI or WordPress.
Doc Pop:
Well this is cool. So the whole purpose of this plugin is to provide alt text descriptions for WordPress images. And like I said, I ran it yesterday myself on my site. There’s 100 free credits, I think, that you can start off with and it’s important to note that I guess that the first 100 are free. And then I assume there’s some sort of, I didn’t get into payment options yet, but I kind of ran it on 100. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what is the purpose of an alt tag for an image and why they’re necessary for a site?
Andrea Vitale:
So the alt tag is very important for a people with a per vision to have a context so of the page that they are looking at that are visiting on the internet and should say, it should have a short description of what is in the image and is very helpful for people to understand what is on the webpage and the problem that we face, working with many clients. This could be a very tedious job to do. And also the problem is the WordPress doesn’t really prompt you that, “Hey, you have to add our text to this image.” So it is up to you, it’s like an option, but focus of our companies to make a internet more accessible as possible. So we think this is a good start to add this option to every image. Our main goal is not to replace the human touch on the alt tag, but is a tool to help people help the content creator or the owner of the website to add this important information on the image for every images on the website.
Doc Pop:
Yeah, so we’re talking about alt text and I have to say I’ve been blogging for 15 years on WordPress and before that I was on blogger and other CMSs and alt text and proper accessibility wasn’t something that I’ve been practicing for most of that time. In particular, I think around four or five years ago is when I started getting better at using headers instead of just bold text or changing the size, like actually making my text formatted correctly. And even then I still wasn’t using alt text until recently and I’m not bragging about that. That’s a shameful thing that I have 15 years of photos because my blog is definitely very image centric. And so this is something that I’m learning about and I’m not an accessibility expert so I might misspeak, but I’m trying my best to learn about it.
And we were saying that this will scan images… I think I can go to, well first off, let me just show if you are on WordPress, if for some reason my media isn’t loading properly here, but when you’re in WordPress you’ll have sections for alternative text and so you can have your image when you’re in your media browser and then you have alternative texts and you have a caption.
And I guess, is there anything we should know about there’s description, caption, alternative text, those three things to an average user, those might sound like the same thing. Do you know the difference between these?
Andrea Vitale:
The screen reader for vision is reading the alt tag and this is the only thing that is reading from the webpage. Caption and description you can use it for if you wanted the image, I have a caption underneath, but the screen reader is looking for the alt text to actually help people to understand what is in that picture.
Doc Pop:
And I know that there’s kind of a way of writing alt text. The goal, I’ve heard people say that the goal is to describe the purpose of the image. Can you explain that to the viewers? When you’re writing an alt text, if you’re writing it by hand, what is the way you should be writing? What is the purpose of why you’re writing it?
Andrea Vitale:
So for example, you have a paragraph before the picture it is important that also the alt text have a kind of context of what is in the paragraph. Basically the goal here is to make a text description that is in the context of the article of the webpage to help someone that can usually see the page to understand better the page. So our tool is doing, the start of it is describing what exactly is in the picture. And of course if you want to add… So 80% of the time our tool is right. If you want to add a context, our tool don’t know exactly what is in the page so you need to maybe tweak a little bit. But as I said, is a very, very helpful tool to start. And if you start from a blank canvas is a blank canvas is more difficult, more time-consuming.
And if you have already a description of what is inside the picture and maybe is good as it is or you want to have some other context because you know that images goes in page of the describing some kind of products that you want to be more specific or you can easily add on our tools.
Doc Pop:
So I’ll pull up the screen here just so people can see the examples. So we’re in settings. We’re in EveryAlt and there’s the bulk text generator. First off, you have to go to settings and create an account and get your API key for your 100 free credits. So I’ve already ran a 100 queues here, queries here. And so this is kind of what it looks like when it’s done. It shows a history and what you’re saying, I think, is pretty good. I would say each of these, I wouldn’t say 80% of the tags are right. I would say each alt text from my experience is like 80% right. It’s all pretty close. And then maybe I just need to tweak something in each tag. But it’s a really good starting point for me is what I found is if I didn’t have any texts, this is a good way for me to go in.
And I guess it’s kind of like they say if you want to get a response, tweak the wrong thing or something and you’ll get lots of feedback. For me this motivates me to find images that haven’t been properly tagged and go through, I mean this one’s great, two people take a selfie, that’s totally accurate. So that’s 100%, but if there’s something off it just give me a chance to be like, “Oh I know how to work around that.” So I really appreciated that. That’s actually kind of how I use, I’m really hogging the mic here, but that’s kind of how I use AI in general as a starting springboard.
We were saying before the show that if I wanted to write a description for something and I went to ChatGPT, I wouldn’t just take that and post it. I’m going to ChatGPT because I’m mentally stuck and it gives me something and that helps me, that helps unlock and I hope that other people kind of use this tool the same way.
And I think you’ve touched upon this the same way. It’s not necessarily meant to be a quick fix. It sounds like it’s still something that you’re hoping and even the way the history gives you a very easy edit option right there on the page, it really feels like this is sort of, we’ve written something but you should go through and check it by hand. Everybody should still go through and check it by hand. You shouldn’t treat this as done. But this is going to speed up the process for you. So am I putting words in your mouth there?
Andrea Vitale:
No, no, no. It’s also the history page was more of a tool to see what our logic was doing and then, oh wow, this is pretty cool because in WordPress there is any place that you can easily edit the alt text. You need to open every major and then save the image alt text. But it came out that you can use this page and do the job in just like 50% of the time you need to do in the media editor and in the future release of the plugin, we are going to improve a lot, this page, adding other function.
Doc Pop:
I thought this was a pretty good description here. I’m just pretty impressed, actually. So this is album art for my album Score Wars, which is a soundtrack I made for a video game. So it’s a drawing of me kind of playing a ukulele wearing a squirrel suit and the alt text did a really good job here. A squirrel is listening to the original soundtrack of a game called Squirrel Wars. That’s really impressive. Composed by Doc Pop. Full text Squirrel Wars original soundtrack by Dc Pop. I don’t think there’s any typos. This is very, I mean this is a hand drawn piece of art. Boy, this is really impressive. Now I was asking Rob Howard about this through email yesterday. Maybe you can talk a little bit about this. This is only looking at the image. It’s not looking at any other metadata. It’s not looking at the title or the block post. Your tool is only looking at the image file and the AI is processing that. And then large language model is kind of reprocessing it back into text, right?
Andrea Vitale:
Correct. Yes. We are a analyzing the image and then we are a language model doing a sort of second passage or to analyze the text and we then add some logic also to clean up some weirdness that could happen. And there is also an OCR tool to read what actually is in the image. And from the text we were able to… Like the picture that you show is a very good example. So we read the text and then we have the language model that can interpret that text and based out on our prompt can make an alt text that make sense instead of just putting the plain text on the image of our text. So it is a mix of language model image analysis, a bunch of logic that we also add inside our application.
And the cool things that since we are doing this in a centralized way, if tomorrow we want to change some logic, we don’t have to push another version of the plugin, but we can just change a prompt or change a logic on our servers and the plugin will works fine without having to have data, any logic on the plugin inside on the WordPress. So since this AI world is evolving every week there’s something new. So it will be very easy for us to… Like now we are like you said, 80% right. Maybe in a week we will reach 90% or so. We are very excited about this and I think it’s coming to be what we want to achieve like a tool to help website owner or content creator to make their website more. Access.
Doc Pop:
So let’s talk a little bit about as a user what the cost would be for this. So if you’re a WordPress user, you download the plugin for free, you get 100 credits, what is the kind of pricing structure after that for users?
Andrea Vitale:
So after the first one, other images, we have the $9.99 to add other 1,000 images. So you can process another 1,000 and of course is you can add your credits to your account and you can use for multiple website with the same key. If you have 100 images that need alt text on website, one website you can use the same tokens. For another website that have maybe 15 images. And we try to make these apps much easier as possible so you don’t have to create a different account for every website or you may have and also you have the option to revoke the key if generated one. So we sync 1,000 images for $9.99. We cover lot of website because 1,000 images are a huge number for an average [inaudible 00:17:11] website.
Doc Pop:
And I know that the tools you all are using, well they’re not free. I’m not sure what you’re plugging into. I’m assuming GPT3 for the large language model or something different?
Andrea Vitale:
It is a secret recipe.
Doc Pop:
Okay, secret recipe. And I do know that whatever you’re using it is kind of trained to generate text in the style of alt text. So it’s not just generating text, it’s trying to do something there. But I know that those tools aren’t cheap and I’m assuming processing the images is also not cheap. So $9.99 for 1,000, it’s not a bad deal. I actually happen to have, I’ll show you my screen here. According to the first pass of EveryAlt I’ve run 100, which is my quota and it looks like I have about 1,500 left and I have one more website that probably has 400. So I could see 20 bucks. That’s not bad for my needs especially to get it started. So that’s not a bad deal.
Andrea Vitale:
No. And then you can always, as I said, develop a new website tomorrow you can use the same API key and just you don’t have anymore 1,000 images without alt, so
Doc Pop:
Let’s see here. Let’s talk about a few other questions that I had in terms of EveryAlt and if you’re just joining me, I’m talking to Andrea Vitale from HDC who is working on a plugin called EveryAlt that adds alt text to untagged images in your WordPress repository. Uses AI to generate the text. And I think we talked about why alt text is important. I mean, it is nice to have text that makes a way to make the site more accessible to all your readers. If you have a shop you don’t want to not have a portion of your customers just because they can’t see the images or whatever. There’s all sorts of actual business cases but also it’s just nice for the web. And even just myself, I’ve been saying that I’ve been using alt text a lot on social media.
I’ve been actually viewing alt text, it’s actually helping me and I have sight, not great site, but it’s been very beneficial to me. The same way that some people might watch YouTube with closed captions on is apparently kind of a thing. I’m kind of using alt text a lot and because of that I found an appreciation for it. And I was kind of wondering, Andrea, if you happen to know if alt text is something that Google will penalize you for if you don’t have it? I do know that they penalize you if you misuse it. Like if you try to spam it with SEO. But do you know anything about how Google treats alt text and maybe how EveryAlt could play into that?
Andrea Vitale:
Is if you run a page speed test, you have the accessibility to score and if you don’t have on the edges your score will analyze. So, of course, Googles likes it when you can see 100% accessibility score. And so another thing I would like to say that is also if your website is not 100% accessibility, you can be sued by one that is trying to use it. So I don’t want to say that you have to do this because you can sue because it is the right thing to do, but it’s very important also to know that is something that could be risky, especially for a big company to not complain to these laws. And so it is not just… Google prefer when you have 100% accessibility score, of course. You have to do for because it’s the right things and also because you can be sued if your website is not complaint all the ADI laws.
Doc Pop:
Well I was wondering also, so you’re saying ADA compliance is part of this in search engine optimization. Just wondering if… Well I guess I had a couple of things and I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but one thing I was wondering is, should we be tagging the tags as AI like if they’re not reviewed by human yet, should we be letting users know that these are generated or that was just a thing on my mind is if someone comes to my site and they haven’t quite reviewed all 100 images of mine, maybe they should be warned. This hasn’t been hand selected yet or whatever. This is an AI. But that you all have any thoughts about doing?
Andrea Vitale:
Yes, I was thinking right before our call, because I saw a Twitter from a user that suggests that maybe we can do something and put the alt text generated by AI in some kind of [inaudible 00:23:04] mode. So you can go to the tools history page and approve, not approve, edit and publish. So I really like the idea of this user because it will add a layer of, I don’t want security but so you need to look at the alt text generated by how you approve it and I think it is a nice future where we are probably going to add in one of the next release of the volume.
Doc Pop:
That was actually going to be one of my suggestions going back to the history page. So this is the page that EveryAlt has spit out these images in this alt text and it’s a good way to go in and edit. And I was just thinking like, “Oh, it should be nice because I have 100 and potentially I might have 1,400 if I sign up for the service.” It would be nice to be able to go through and be like, “Okay, which ones haven’t I checked yet?” Or whatever, because it does get a little tedious, but that would be a cool feature if you all could add something on this page that’s just sort of “approve it” or “this one has been checked off on by human,” or something like that. That’d be neat.
Andrea Vitale:
Also, we want to add a checkbox to exclude some images from the tool creator. If you have an icon or something that is pure decorative, you don’t want to run it to the eye because you shouldn’t have enough text. Like I said, the history page that we did as a first for us to check what the logic was doing, I think I have a lot of space of improvements and we are going to work on that particular page very soon.
Doc Pop:
So lets kind of wrap up. EveryAlt and one more time I’ll just kind of show people EveryAlt.com if you want to find out more information. There’s a couple examples here. The dog lies and the blanket is text that was narrated. It shows some of the examples and people can find out more about that here. I know that Rob has been talking about a whole suite of AI WordPress plugins. I’m kind of curious. What is next for EveryAlt? I know we talked a little bit about the history page. What’s next for EveryAlt and then maybe just give us a kind of, if you can, a little sneak preview of maybe some other projects you all are working on right now for WordPress.
Andrea Vitale:
We are thinking to do something specifically for the content, for the CO and especially for WordPress that the good things that… Since you are working directly on the database, you can run this kind of things in bulk because you can go to, for example, ChatGPT and ask Create a CEO for this page. But you have to for not only every page since if we can reach a point that we can add a plugin in WordPress to query all the content and create CO in bulk. This is something that we would like to explore if it’s doable, if it’s good enough for CO or if… So there are many, many ideas that we have and this is just the beginning for us and I hope that this is not the last part that we are going to do, but as I said, the feedback from the users that already subscribed to our service, it’s pretty good.
But our main goal for now is just focus on this to make this work as possible as better that we can do and improve the logic on the text that is being generated by our prompt, our use of tags. So then for the foreseeable future, we are going to work mainly on this and improve this. So you never know what comes next in especially AI.
Doc Pop:
Well it’s a cool project. EveryAlt.com. I will once again stress just with my personal recommendation that nobody use any accessibility tools fully automated. I’m hoping that anyone who’s interested in this and is like, “Oh man, I do have a lot of images I need to tag.” I hope that you use this as a springboard. That’s how I plan to use it and not as a bandaid. Like this isn’t just like your site’s fixed, it’s accessible now. But from my experience kind of going through, like I said, quite a few of these, I mean were spot on and a few others were, well, most of them were really close. So I just needed to say instead of two people, it’s one person. I just needed to make a change.
But I really appreciate it. At least, I guess it puts it on my mind because even though I’ve been practicing adding alt text to images, I still have a lot of work to do on my background and this is at least getting me to go back and tag some images that are pretty old and they’re on popular posts, so I should have them updated.
Andrea Vitale:
Also with the plugin, you just go to the [inaudible 00:29:03] page and see how many images you got [inaudible 00:29:08] text. Like, for me was shocking because I tried the plugin on some of the websites I did years ago. I have thousands of images without alt text. And so it’s shocking even myself I forgot to do it or the clients didn’t do because some clients almost don’t know what is the best that they have to do because as I said, WordPress doesn’t prompt you really that you resolve your image. So it is a great [inaudible 00:29:48]. We think that could improve the website accessibility a lot.
Doc Pop:
And I want to pivot a little bit, Andrea, if you don’t mind to this is a project that we’re working on at torquemag.io. It is plugin related. I want to talk a little bit about plugimadness.com. PluginMadness is our annual bracket style competition where we bat…We put 64 WordPress plugins from the free WordPress plugin repository. These are all user submitted and once we have the submissions, we kind of file them down to 64 based on the category, like if it’s marketing or SEO or optimization. We also make sure that they have been maintained recently and we try to go, if we have multiple entries, we try to kind of weed it down to ones that have large user bases and nice ratings and stuff like that. So we’re kind of starting with the community submissions and now it’s into the voting phase and we are in week two of our voting.
So here we have the four different categories and in each category you can kind of see the different matchups, advanced custom fields versus Yost, Faust versus Smush. We’re kind of hoping Smush versus Imagify, but maybe that’ll be the next one. Those are two image compression tools. So you can go to pluginmadness.com right now to go vote and we do ask for your email, but that’s not because we’re going to spam you where you’re just making sure that you’re a human. So we’re just trying to keep everything running smoothly with that so you can go there and vote very easily. It’s very quick to sign up and I highly recommend going to pluginmadness.com, which is also on if you just go to torquemag.io, you should see that. And we also have a video on, Andrea, can I show you our pitch video? It’s 60 seconds long.
Andrea Vitale:
Sure.
Doc Pop:
All right, here we go. This is the Plugin Madness 2023 pitch video starring a very handsome actor here-
Speaker 3:
Welcome to the Ultimate Showdown of WordPress plugins. This is Plugin Madness where 64 of the most popular and widely used WordPress plugins go head-to-head in a bracket style competition to determine the very best of the very best. This year’s competition sees the return of past Plugin Madness champions pairing off against the parade of new contenders who enter with high hopes of being the winner. This is no ordinary competition. This is a battle of the plugin where only one can emerge victorious. The stakes are high, the competition is fierce. Who will come out on top. You decide. You can cast your vote now on pluginmadness.com and come back each week until we have our winner. Buckle up. It’s going to be one wild ride.
Doc Pop:
Something went wrong there at the end. So pluginmadness.com to go vote for your favorite plugins. We do not have EveryAlt on this year because it was just launched yesterday, but maybe next year EveryAlt we’ll have a whole section of AI, fifth category of AI. But Andrea, it’s been great having you on the show.
Speaker 3:
Thank you.
Doc Pop:
Once again, we’ve got EveryAlt.com. We also have hdc.dev, which I will bring up here. This is the folks who make EveryAlt and also MasterWP, which we love here at Torque. Is there anything else you want to plug while we have you here?
Andrea Vitale:
No, I think we talked about our main goal and I’m really happy to have spoke with you.
Doc Pop:
Well. Andrea, I really appreciate your time. Best of luck with EveryAlt. I am looking forward to seeing how it changes and it is an exciting time. I think a lot of us are very nervous about AI. It seems everywhere and it seems both filled with possibility and kind of scary. And it is nice to see people trying to think about useful hacks for AI and things that could possibly improve the web for everybody. So it’d be interesting to see how as a technology gets better and as you all get feedback, what happens with EveryAlt? I doubt I’ll ever have it as just my 100%, this is my alt tag generator, but I am kind of interested to see how it gets better throughout the years.
Andrea Vitale:
Yeah, we’re very excited also to… Every day we are trying something different, works better or it works not so much better, but it is very exciting to work on this technology and I think people doesn’t need to be scared about that. It’s just another tool to make our life easier. And internet 20 years ago was seen like a monster for many people. Now is everybody use internet, so it’s the same things. I think it’s just try to use the technology in the best way as possible to make our life better.
Doc Pop:
Yeah. Well, Andrea, thank you so much for joining me. I hope you have a great evening. And just a reminder, the Torque Social Hour is a weekly live stream of WordPress news and events. We happen usually from 3:00 to 4:00 PM Pacific Standard Time each interview Wednesday. You can join us next Wednesday. We don’t have our guests yet. If you are interested in being on the show, if you have a plugin you’d like to talk about or WordPress topic that you would like to talk about, please hit me up. You can do it on Twitter at the torquemag, or you can find us on torque mag.io. Thanks for watching. We’ll see everyone next week.
Andrea Vitale:
Thank you. Bye.
