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Facebook Is Following Twitter’s Lead With Automatic Photo Captions For Blind People

By Florin Ivan

Posted on April 5, 2016

Today we’re proud to introduce automatic alternative text, a new feature that provides people who are visually impaired with descriptions of a photo’s content using advancements in object recognition technology. For more info, stop by Facebook Accessibility.
Posted by Facebook on Monday, April 4, 2016

One week after Twitter announced alternative text for photos as a way of enabling blind users to experience shared content better, Facebook followed with an AI-powered feature. Mark Zuckerberg’s social media platform is offering automatic Alt Text on iOS and soon, Android. #softwaremagic

From now on, visually impaired Facebook users that use screen readers will know the name of the person who posted, the description text and what is in the photo posted. Thanks to their AI programme, photos will be described in a couple of words making users feel included in the situation. Clearly, Facebook’s neural networks had time to see and analyze lots of photos over the time, since more than 2 billion are shared daily on Facebook, Instagram , Messenger and WhatsApp nowadays.

While Twitter has just started work in artificial intelligence last year and its new accessibility feature implies manual insertion of captions by users, Facebook is generating descriptions based on what its AI learned so far. To turn it on, blind people will have to enable VoiceOver in the Accessibility menu on iOS devices; if they are on Android, they will have to wait a little bit longer. The feature will become available in other languages, besides English, later. #mobilemagic