Lat × Long

Audio Descriptions for Interactive Maps

Link: https://sparkgeo.com/blog/map-to-speech-a-method-for-making-web-maps-more-accessible/

Darren Wiens of SparkGeo demonstrates an AI-driven approach to generating audio descriptions for interactive web maps. The overall process is simple yet effective:

  1. Convert the current map view to an image.
  2. Upload the image to OpenAI’s API to return a text description of the images.
  3. Upload the text description to OpenAI’s API to receive the audio of the text description.

It’s one example of how new generative AI technologies can be put to good use. It is simply impossible for humans to provide alt-text for large interactive maps and AI is the one (the only?) way to make textual descriptions of maps scalable.

Topic: Knowledge