WebSight: An AI-based Approach to Enhance Web Accessibility for the Visually Impaired

Web accessibility plays a significant role in shaping our online experiences in today's ever-changing digital world. People with vision impairmentsstill have trouble using most websites. This paper introduces WebSight an innovative AI-based Image Description Generator web extension to address these challenges. By seamlessly interfacing with a Flask server, Optical Character Recognition, and a dedicated Image Description Generator model, this browser extension systematically enhances web accessibility by methodically replacing ‘alt’ attributes of images with meticulously generated descriptions. This approach significantly contributes to web inclusivity, providing visually impaired users with accurate and contextually rich information. The extension's commitment to inclusivity is further demonstrated through the intelligent integration of Tesseract-OCR and Text-to-Speech ensuring a novel and far-reaching impact, offering an enhanced and tailored browsing experience for users with visual impairments.