Facebook helps blind people
Posted on: 06/Apr/2016 12:22:02 PM
More than 2 billion people use Facebook and other social networking sites to share their photos. At the same time it poses challenges for people who are blind or severely visually impaired. With more than 39 million people who are blind, and over 246 million who have a severe visual impairment, many people may feel excluded from the conversation around photos on Facebook.
So Facebook is introducing automatic alternative text. What does it do? Automatic alternative text, or automatic alt text, is a new development that generates a description of a photo using advancements in object recognition technology. People using screen readers on iOS devices will hear a list of items a photo may contain as they swipe past 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.
Facebook is launching automatic alt text first on iOS screen readers set to English, but they plan to add this functionality for other languages and platforms soon.
