Milan/Bologna, 14 May 2026. Artificial intelligence gives voice to images in books for blind or visually impaired people. The Bologna-based publisher Il Mulino and Fastweb + Vodafone have created a solution that uses generative artificial intelligence technology to create alternative and extended descriptions of images in digital versions of books, as part of the process aimed at making the entire digital catalog accessible. A prototype of the solution was premiered at the 38th edition of the Salone del Libro di Torino.
The alternative descriptions that the solution is able to generate are made with advanced linguistic models specialized in the educational field. This means that they are able to adapt to the technical language of a given topic : medicine, history, geography, mathematics, law, economics and any other sector subject to publication. The specialization of language models thus makes even the images within the book accessible to blind people, in a consistent and just as technical way with the language of the single publication of the Il Mulino catalog.
The solution has been integrated into the production process of the digital editions of Il Mulino, characterized by a high level of automation, thus making it possible to comply with accessibility standards for all new publications.
At the same time, the solution is also being extended to the works already in the catalog, as part of a path oriented to the inclusion and full accessibility of knowledge, understood as civil and cultural responsibility
The Il Mulino publishing company has long been committed to making its catalog accessible, to meet the different needs of all readers. In this context, the collaboration with Fastweb + Vodafone allows the publisher to fulfill the obligations set out in Legislative Decree no. 82/202, which transposes the European Accessibility Act (EU Directive 2019/882). The solution created with Fastweb + Vodafone makes it possible to make the process of analyzing and producing texts scalable and more automated, in line with the digital evolution of the publishing sector. The presence of an automated workflow in which one or more Artificial Intelligence agents (the so-called agentic AI) perform complex end-to-end activities, makes it possible to reduce paratext production times, to guarantee stylistic uniformity and to improve editorial efficiency.