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Similar to what Facebook does automatically [0] which was easily visible with an outage they had in 2019 [1].

[0] - https://research.fb.com/videos/automatic-alt-text-for-photos...

[1] - https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681231/facebook-outage-i...

> alt="A woman with medium-light skin and long dark hair."

Interesting. Government accessibility requirements maybe?

Yep. All government sites have to be accessible due to section 508. These descriptions look like they were generated by some ML vision algorithm.

I've always wondered about this. What exactly should you describe in an alt text? Are there established guidelines one could reference to determine what is appropriate?

Accessibility guidelines in the alt spec used to say "correctly describe the intended purpose of the image if the image was missing or unable to be loaded".

It would have probably been a bit more on the nose to be like "A woman of a non-white race showing our agency is capable of diversity"

Have a read through the section 508 guidelines [0] from the US government, they link off to a couple of good sites detailing what the text should be.

[0] - https://www.section508.gov/content/guide-accessible-web-desi...