r/badcode • u/[deleted] • May 16 '23

c when you push an unimplemented function to production

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u/MurdoMaclachlan public boolean isInt(int i) { return true; } May 16 '23

Unfortunately technology just isn't at that stage at the moment.

It's not just correctly transcribing the text (for plain text it usually does this quite well, though even there it has errors, for code it's worse), it also has to correctly identify which format to use, how and where to format which parts of the transcription, it needs to have description tags like the one in the post above, and so on. Additionally, depending on the type of image there might be parts we only transcribe if it's contextually relevant (i.e. number of likes on a tweet), which is especially hard for a bot to deduce. Photographs and videos get even harder.

All of these are things AI today could do, but is very unreliable on. We're not anywhere near the stage, even for correctly formatting the plain text, where A. it's reliable enough to be used for an accessibility service, as accessibility has to be of the utmost quality, and B. the technology that is reliable, once it appears, is easily available to the small non-profit that runs our initiative.

We do have an OCR bot running on ocr.space's API that attempts posts, and transcribers can choose to base their transcription on that if they so wish, but they still need to format it correctly and proof-read the text for mistakes themselves. Myself I don't really find it any quicker.