Eric Hellman

Pleased to report that AI bots will create countless new jobs for customer support evasion specialists. These folks will be experts at routing user around the customer support(sic) bots that have no clue how to fix problems except to point to documentation pages that now advise users to consult the CS(sic)bots.

Looking at you, Facebook.

OMG the Google AI Overview for "clickstream poetry".

Science Times was so interesting today. Black hole neutrinos and hermit crabs!

@AlSweigart@mastodon.social I think a better word for it is that the quotes were bullshitted. You’re too good to be hallucinated.

The team is really proud about this one!
@gutenberg_new@mastodon.social

50 years between the Gutenberg invention and the viability of a continuing information revolution. Sound familiar @gutenberg_org@mastodon.social ?
@wackJackle@norden.social

Got a ticket to the Newark show!

It looks like Tom Malinowski is going to win the NJ primary election to be the Dem candidate to replace Mikie Sherrill. For the 11th district. I voted for him, mostly because I got so much anonymous attack mail against him that i thought: if the big money hates him; he must be good!

I believe in the promised land.

Here's something I've been working on for over 2 years, and I wanted to have something to show before Public Domain Day tomorrow: a fully accessible ebook, completely in the Public Domain. A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/67098

The conversion of all 75,000 texts in Project Gutenberg to Accessible EPUB3 is an ongoing collective effort, but the last missing piece for Pooh was to supply image descriptions in alt text worthy of this iconic work. I hope we've mostly succeeded!

With work being done to implement the Marrakesh Treaty, national "authorized entities" are now able to share accessible versions of in-copyright works with each other internationally, but we don't have to wait for that in the case of works in the Public Domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marrakesh_VIP_Treaty

Project Gutenberg's accessible version of Winnie-the-Pooh can be shared freely throughout the world. If you don't like the added alt text, you are free to change it! (but maybe you'd prefer to work on one of the thousands of books that don't yet have image descriptions for the visually impaired!)

Creating alt text for a work of fiction is both hard work and a lot of fun. The descriptions have to fit in to the narrative of the text, without adding subjective interpretation of the illustrations. Not easy at all!

For example, the alt text for the illustration showing Pooh peering up at the bees can't call them bees, because in the next sentence, Pooh thinks: "That buzzing-noise means something. You don't get a buzzing-noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something."
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67098/pg67098-images.html#img_images_illus15.jpg

For Pooh, some technical corrections were necessary as well. The horizontal rules around the illustrations needed to be silenced with the HTML5 aria-hidden attribute. Six illustrations needed to be moved up or down a sentence to fit into the narrative.

In Chapter 7, the sentence: "If this is flying I shall never really take to it." had been rendered across 3 lines with margins and spaces, jumbling the word order. A change to vertical-align rendering makes it more accessible to everybody - I could copy and paste it!
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67098/pg67098-images.html#images/illus73.jpg

We've played with AI for image description, and the results are quite good for complex figures and the like, but it will be quite a while before AI image descriptions can be set loose without human editors, especially for works like Pooh. AI's can completely whiff on the simplest images!

We're working to create UIs for alt text editing and creation to enable more people to help out in accessibility mitigation. Maybe one of these people will be you! There are thousand of books that need help.