This is brilliant.
Facebook are to begin automatically describing photos to blind and visually impaired users of the social networking site.
The Verge reports the technology is called Automatic Alternative Text, that describes the content of photographs and was created by Facebook’s accessibility team.
The team had already made small changes to improve accessibility including adding an option to increase the font size for iOS, to make it easier for those visually impaired users.
The AAT technology is coming to iOS today and later to the internet and Android uses artificial intelligence to recognise objects in pictures like dogs, trees, planes for example.
The technology is always improving, and will be able to place images into categories and even identify human expressions like smiling or frowning.
Head of Accessibility Matt King said “Inclusion is really powerful and exclusion is really painful.The impact of doing something like this is really telling people who are blind, your ability to participate in the social conversation that’s going on around the world is really important to us.”
What a fantastic use of some very advanced technology.
Here’s Matt King’s story, uploaded to Facebook Accessibility’s page.
Automatic Alternative TextFacebook accessibility specialist and engineer Matt King lost his vision completely in college. When he joined our accessibility team after more than 20 years in the accessibility field, one of the projects he was most excited to work on centered on using object recognition technology to automatically describe photos for people who are not able to see those photos. Today, with our launch of automatic alternative text, we’re taking an important step towards achieving that goal.Automatic alternative text, or automatic alt text, is a new feature that generates a description of a photo through object recognition technology for someone who cannot see the photo. Before today, people who are visually impaired could only hear the name of the person who posted the photo as they scrolled past photos on Facebook. Now, if they’re using a screen reader on iOS, they’ll hear a richer description of the photo thanks to automatic alt text. For example, for a group photo on the beach, a person using a screen reader on iOS would now hear, “This image may contain: Three people, smiling, outdoors.” We are rolling this out in English over the next few weeks and will add more languages and platforms soon.Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected, and that means everyone, including the visually impaired community. Worldwide, more than 39 million people are blind, and over 246 million have a severe visual impairment. While this technology is still in its early stages, tapping its current capabilities to describe photos is a huge step toward providing our visually impaired community the same benefits and enjoyment that everyone else gets from photos. As Facebook becomes an increasingly visual experience, we hope our new automatic alt text technology will help the visually impaired community experience Facebook the same way others enjoy it.
Posted by Facebook Accessibility on Monday, 4 April 2016
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