Facebook's new automatic alternative text feature can tell the visually impaired and blind what is in a photo.
Facebook is one of the largest photo sharing website online. Reports suggest its users have uploaded more than 250 billion photos and are uploading nearly 350 million new photos per day. These photos do not include those uploaded on Instagram. The massive photo uploads on the social media network highlights that photos are a major mode of communication on Facebook.
Visual content offers an expressive and fun way of communicating online. However, it is a challenge for blind and visually impaired people. More than 39 million blind people and 246 million with some visual impairment are often left out of conversations regarding images.
With automatic alternative text, Facebook wants the blind community to experience photos on Facebook the same way as others do.
Automatic alternative text is an AI-generated photo caption, which creates a description of an image with object recognition technology. Blind or visually impaired users will hear to a list of items a photo contains when they browse through photos on Facebook.
"Before today, people using screen readers would only hear the name of the person who shared the photo, followed by the term 'photo' when they came upon an image in News Feed. Now we can offer a richer description of what's in a photo thanks to automatic alt text. For instance, someone could now hear, 'Image may contain three people, smiling, outdoors,'" says Facebook.
The company explains that the object recognition technology is based on a neural network, which has billions of factors and it has been trained with millions of examples. The photo captions are short and sweet and often very poetic, which is expected to impress users.
Matt King, Facebook's accessibility specialist who is blind, says that the feature is evolving and it is getting better even in internal testing. King says that he was amazed to find that the system informed him of the presence of deviled eggs and cauliflower in a photo that was attached to a Facebook post.
Facebook has launched the automatic alternative text, or automatic alt text, for iOS devices alone and initially only in English. However, it plans to introduce the novel feature to more platforms and in more languages in the near term.
The social networking site says that the technology used in automatic alt text is still at a nascent stage and the company is trying to tap more capabilities of the feature.
Check out a short video of the new Facebook feature.
