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I kind of resent having a pdf editor in my web browser at all. Putting a giant LLM-based image classifier in there seems inadvisable even if it was going to do something more useful than suggest alt text for images you add to pdfs.
Accessibility tools that can describe images, as well as pdf editing, are fine things for Mozilla to work on but they really shouldn’t be done as part of Firefox alone. Image describing has way more uses than just what’s found in the web browser, and should be a system-wide thing. There’s no point in each application having its own. Doing it only for things inserted into pdfs compounds the absurdity. If the accessibility APIs that exist can’t handle it, it’s time to propose a better one — and maybe go ahead and implement it on Linux. Solving the problem properly would be a more ambitious goal, but one that seems appropriate for an organization with the stature of Mozilla.
Why is this bad?
I kind of resent having a pdf editor in my web browser at all. Putting a giant LLM-based image classifier in there seems inadvisable even if it was going to do something more useful than suggest alt text for images you add to pdfs.
Accessibility tools that can describe images, as well as pdf editing, are fine things for Mozilla to work on but they really shouldn’t be done as part of Firefox alone. Image describing has way more uses than just what’s found in the web browser, and should be a system-wide thing. There’s no point in each application having its own. Doing it only for things inserted into pdfs compounds the absurdity. If the accessibility APIs that exist can’t handle it, it’s time to propose a better one — and maybe go ahead and implement it on Linux. Solving the problem properly would be a more ambitious goal, but one that seems appropriate for an organization with the stature of Mozilla.
gonna assume it’s for the pdf reader, considering that’s where alt text in images is needed.