Actually Useful AI: BlueSky Social Accessibility

I made a tiny BlueSky client to automatically handle my alt text

I was member ~55,000 or so at BlueSky, which has honestly been a really wild experience over the past year as things have taken off. One of the reasons I was recruited to come over there originally was to help drive culture around accessibility and mental health, and I’m happy to say that’s pretty much all I do around there.

Many of you know I’ve had an alt text generator available for social media posts for some time now - and that’s still there, along with high end options that you can log into with a $2 paywall. That involved a lot of copy-pasting, though, so I build a tiny client of my own that you can post from directly.

On BlueSky? Here it is!

blueFlyer

One of the reasons I did this was because I’m not happy with the “automatic alt” generated for GIFs in the BlueSky, so I built a whole Tenor integration before remembering that BlueSky’s is app-specific. Oops. Time well spent. So that’s useless in the main tool, but here’s a silly l leftover that I’ll still use to make alt because the GIF search results are the same: