Facebook has recently made it easier for blind users to share the same experience as the rest of the community of Facebook users by filling in the Photo Blanks.
Facebook introduced on Monday April 6, 2016 an automated alt text which is a new tool that helps blind users to visualize the images as they scroll up and down.
“There seems to be a general movement towards making technology more accessible. I think people are recognizing the great opportunities. There are close to 250 million people around the world with visual impairments and almost 40 million who are actually blind,” Susan Schreiner, an analyst at C4 Trends said for TechNewsWorld.
Led by Matt King, Jeff Wieland, and Shaomei Wu, the aim of this new project is to make blind users enjoy and interact on their social media platform without having any seatbacks compared to the rest of the community that uses Facebook.
All blind users will be able to hear a description of the photo which according to TechNewsWorld will be provided as “an HTML attribute designed for content managers to provide text alternatives for images,” as users swipe images on their Facebook account.
So far the new tool is available in English for residents of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand for all iOS users.
As more companies are using AI in the favor of humans, Facebook’s new introduced tool is yet another proof that artificial intelligence has been advancing a lot and it can become helpful especially for disabled people. “Automating alt text will lead to massive improvements in real-time indexing of images,” principal analyst at the Enderle Group Rob Enderle said for TechNewsWorld.
This new technologies will enable more things to come to life and allow blind people to interact more easily and be safe on the road since they won’t have to use their hands while driving as they will be able to hear the descriptions for each photo.
This new step in technology, according to Enderle “could be adapted to seeing prosthetics, helping those that can't see emulate sight. This is a big step toward creating more intelligent machines that can be used to help the disabled and to create autonomous machines by enabling far more capable visual recognition systems.”
To come up with this new tool, Facebook selected around 100 different concepts, objects and scenes to make them as much accurate as possible when getting recognized by the AI.