New Facebook Functionality Helps Describe Photos to Visually Impaired Users

Facebook introduced a new functionality -- automatic alternative (or alt) text -- that aims to describe photos on the website to blind or visually impaired users. "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," wrote software engineers Shaomei Wu and Hermes Pique and the Head-Accessibility Jeffrey Wieland in a Monday blog post. With this advancement, as a Facebook user encounters a photo using a screen reader on iOS devices, the user will hear a number of items that a photo may contain. "Someone could now hear, 'Image may contain three people, smiling, outdoors,'" the three wrote. Previously, screen readers only identified the name of the person sharing the photo and the term "photo" when they came across one, they said. Automatic alt text produces the description using object recognition technology, which is "based on a neural network that has billions of parameters and is trained with millions of examples," the three wrote. They said the company is launching the "nascent" technology first on iOS screen readers set to English but plan to expand it soon to other languages and platforms.