MatplotAlt: A Python Library for Adding Alt Text to Matplotlib Figures in Computational Notebooks
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Date
2025
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Abstract
We present MatplotAlt, an open-source Python package for easily adding alternative text to Matplotlib fgures. MatplotAlt equips Jupyter notebook authors to automatically generate and surface chart descriptions with a single line of code or command, and supports a range of options that allow users to customize the generation and display of captions based on their preferences and accessibility needs. Our evaluation indicates that MatplotAlt's heuristic and LLM-based methods to generate alt text can create accurate long-form descriptions of both simple univariate and complex Matplotlib fgures. We fnd that state-of-the-art LLMs still struggle with factual errors when describing charts, and improve the accuracy of our descriptions by prompting GPT4-turbo with heuristic-based alt text or data tables parsed from the Matplotlib fgure.
Description
@article{10.1111:cgf.70119,
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
title = {{MatplotAlt: A Python Library for Adding Alt Text to Matplotlib Figures in Computational Notebooks}},
author = {Nylund, Kai and Mankoff, Jennifer and Potluri, Venkatesh},
year = {2025},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.},
ISSN = {1467-8659},
DOI = {10.1111/cgf.70119}
}