Reddit needed to generate high-quality alt text for millions of existing images and hundreds of thousands of daily uploads so it could improve accessibility and search discoverability.
Reported impact
Reddit made image content more accessible, saw a significant increase in SEO traffic, and shipped the project faster by using an out-of-the-box service instead of building and operating its own captioning stack.
Reddit evaluated several AI captioning services because manual image description was infeasible at the scale of its platform. The company needed a vision model that could caption many image types accurately, process uploads quickly, and fit directly into its existing image pipeline so captions could be added as alt text for accessibility and SEO without standing up a custom machine-learning team or workflow. Key components include Azure Cognitive Service for Vision generates image captions that Reddit turns into alt text for accessibility and search indexing. Reddit made image content more accessible, saw a significant increase in SEO traffic, and shipped the project faster by using an out-of-the-box service instead of building and operating its own captioning stack.
Images already on Reddit and new user uploads are sent through Azure Cognitive Service for Vision, which generates descriptive captions that Reddit stores as alt text. Those captions are then consumed by screen readers for accessibility and by search engines for better discovery of image content.
Microsoft was very responsive ... such as manually increasing our rate limit to accommodate the volume of images we have.
Reddit moved forward with Azure Cognitive Service for Vision to support the automatic generation of captions for millions of images.
Since adding captions as alt text, Reddit has seen a significant increase in SEO traffic to their images.
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