How University Disability Services Professionals Write Image Descriptions for HCI Figures Using Generative AI

2026-02-09

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge faced by disability support staff in higher education who, lacking expertise in human-computer interaction (HCI), struggle to produce high-quality, academically appropriate alternative text (alt text) for figures in scholarly publications. It presents the first systematic investigation into how generative AI can assist non-expert users in crafting alt text for HCI research papers. Through two user studies complemented by expert evaluations, the research examines both the writing process and output quality under AI assistance. Findings demonstrate that generative AI significantly enhances alt text quality, writing efficiency, and user confidence. Moreover, the work identifies critical bottlenecks in current AI–user interactions, offering empirical insights and design directions for developing more effective AI tools to support accessible content creation in academic contexts.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: AI for Accessibility
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data quality in the era of algorithmically-generated content
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Assisted, interactive, and conversational search

Abstract

Disability Services Office (DSO) professionals at higher education institutions write alt text for {visual content}. However, due to the complexity of visual content, such as HCI figures in research publications, DSO professionals can struggle to write high-quality alt text if they lack subject expertise. Generative AI has shown potential in understanding figures and writing their descriptions, yet its support for DSO professionals is underexplored, and limited work evaluates the quality of alt text generated with AI assistance. In this work, we conducted two studies: first, we investigated generative AI support for writing alt text for HCI figures with 12 DSO professionals. Second, we recruited 11 HCI experts to evaluate the alt text written by DSO professionals. Findings show that alt text written solely by DSO professionals has lower quality than alt text written with AI assistance. AI assistance also helped DSO professionals write alt text more quickly and with greater confidence; however, they reported inefficiencies in interactions with the AI. Our work contributes to exploring AI support for non-subject expert accessibility professionals.

Problem

• alt text
• disability services
• generative AI
• HCI figures
• accessibility

Innovation

• Generative AI
• alt text
• Disability Services
• HCI figures
• accessibility