DescribePhotoA PictureEditor.com tool

About this site

An alt text checker with somewhere to write. You supply the words — for an alt attribute, a caption or a long description — and this site reads them back the way assistive technology will, with the picture and its measurements sitting beside the field. It does not describe photographs, and it is not waiting on a release that would.

Why a whole site for one attribute

Because it is the piece of a web page most consistently left to whatever the camera called the file, and because the advice about it is scattered across specification documents, vendor help pages and blog posts that quote a character limit without saying where it came from. Somebody writing forty alt attributes on a Tuesday afternoon should not have to assemble that themselves.

The other reason is that the checking half is genuinely solvable. A great deal of what goes wrong in alt text is structural — a redundant opening, a file name, a keyword list, a missing pause — and structure is something a program can read reliably. What it cannot read is whether your sentence matches your photograph, and this site is careful about which side of that line it is standing on.

What it does, and the line it does not cross

It does this: reads a string the way a screen reader will and names every structural fault in it, with the edit that fixes it in the same sentence. Takes the measurements a page can honestly make from a picture without recognising anything in it — shape, tone, colour families, edge density — and offers a skeleton with the subject left blank. Refuses images that are pages of text. Loads three rulesets for three different jobs. Carries four written pages for the questions a findings list cannot settle.

It does not write descriptions. That is the line, and it is worth stating in the same breath as the rest rather than in a footnote further down. Proposing the first sentence about a photograph needs a vision model running in the tab, the model needs weights downloaded to the browser, and none are published behind this build. The loading, caching and inference code sits in the repository, honestly labelled and never exercised against real weights; it changes nothing about what you get today.

None of which makes this a lesser tool than a captioner would be. A machine-written sentence still has to be read, corrected and judged by somebody who can see both the picture and the page it is on. That reading is the part this site is good at, and it is the part that decides whether the alt text was any use.

How it is made

A static export. There is no server behind this site, no route that accepts a request and no database anywhere. The picture is decoded by the browser you are already using, measured, and forgotten when you close the tab. That is not a policy decision that could be reversed later — there is no other architecture here to reverse it to.

Advertising is how it is meant to pay for itself, and no advertising is served on this site yet: the master switch in the build is off and no unit renders on any page. When the domain is approved and it is turned on, Google AdSense bands sit below the working surface and never inside it, each reserving its height before it loads so nothing moves under you once you have started reading. Until then the bands are a plan, not a thing on the page.

Where else to go