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.
— Pranjul Rathour, GenAI Engineer from Kanpur, India. Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at any campus: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.