This post explains why an automated assistant may fail to extract readable text from a news link that contains only an image. It offers practical solutions and best practices for journalists, editors, and readers who want reliable AI summarization and accessibility.
I’ll walk through the technical reasons for the failure, actionable steps you can take right away, and recommended tools and workflows to prevent the same problem in the future.
Why an assistant can’t summarize image-only articles
Many news links point to pages that are essentially images — PDFs, screenshots, or scanned pages — rather than HTML text. Automated extractors and summarizers rely on selectable text or embedded metadata; when that’s missing, the assistant has nothing to parse.
This is a common situation with archives, press releases distributed as images, or visual-first platforms that don’t include alternative text.
Even when an assistant has good OCR (optical character recognition) capabilities, image quality, layout complexity, and embedded graphics can prevent clean text recovery. Low resolution, skew, complex columns, or handwriting reduce OCR accuracy and can introduce errors that make summarization unreliable.
Immediate options when you encounter an image-only link
If you run into a link that only contains an image, here are two simple, effective responses you can use right away:
Best practices for publishers and content creators
To make content discoverable, accessible, and machine-readable, follow a few straightforward guidelines. These help search engines, AI summarizers, and readers with disabilities alike.
Here are practical steps to adopt immediately:
Tools and workflows for reliable OCR and summarization
If you must work with images, use established OCR tools and quality-control workflows to extract text and verify accuracy. Combine automated OCR with a human review to catch errors and preserve nuance in complex layouts.
Privacy, copyright and editorial considerations
Before sending images for OCR or sharing full articles, consider copyright and privacy constraints. Extracting and redistributing text from paywalled or copyrighted material may require permission.
Images of people or sensitive documents require redaction and consent checks.
How you can help me help you
If you want an immediate summary right now, please either paste the article text into the chat or describe the image in a few sentences.
Let me know what the headline says, any visible paragraphs, captions, charts or figures.
With that information I can produce a clear, accurate summary or rewrite suitable for publication.
If you prefer, I can also walk you through extracting readable text from images using OCR tools.
I can help draft alt text and metadata to prevent this problem in future posts.
Here is the source article for this story: India Extreme Weather Floods