The paper "FIGURA11y: AI Assistance for Writing Scientific Alt Text" addresses the challenge of creating high-quality alternative text (alt text) for scientific figures to improve accessibility for blind and low-vision readers. The authors, Nikhil Singh and others, highlight the difficulties in crafting complete and accurate alt text, especially for complex figures with varied informational needs. They propose FIGURA11y, an interactive system that generates draft alt text and provides suggestions for revisions using a pipeline driven by extracted figure and paper metadata. The system includes two versions: Draft+Revise, which provides automatically generated drafts and figure metadata, and Interactive Assistance, which adds contextualized suggestions and potential user questions to enhance the revision process. A study with 14 authors found that the system effectively assisted in producing descriptive alt text, enabling efficient drafting and editing without increasing cognitive load or manual effort. The paper also discusses related work, formative studies, and the system's design, emphasizing the importance of human-AI collaboration in generating accessible figure descriptions.The paper "FIGURA11y: AI Assistance for Writing Scientific Alt Text" addresses the challenge of creating high-quality alternative text (alt text) for scientific figures to improve accessibility for blind and low-vision readers. The authors, Nikhil Singh and others, highlight the difficulties in crafting complete and accurate alt text, especially for complex figures with varied informational needs. They propose FIGURA11y, an interactive system that generates draft alt text and provides suggestions for revisions using a pipeline driven by extracted figure and paper metadata. The system includes two versions: Draft+Revise, which provides automatically generated drafts and figure metadata, and Interactive Assistance, which adds contextualized suggestions and potential user questions to enhance the revision process. A study with 14 authors found that the system effectively assisted in producing descriptive alt text, enabling efficient drafting and editing without increasing cognitive load or manual effort. The paper also discusses related work, formative studies, and the system's design, emphasizing the importance of human-AI collaboration in generating accessible figure descriptions.