Photos have always been a big part of Facebook’s allure. From profile pictures to status updates to wall posts, photos have always bolstered the social media platform and they’ve gone to great lengths to ensure it always will, such as acquiring Instagram and MSQRD (they even tried & failed to acquire Snapchat).
Unfortunately the sad truth is that not everyone can revel in the photos that bombard the social platform everyday, not everyone can have a reaction to a birthday picture; for the blind and visually impaired, Facebook may have well been a text-based platform. However thanks to Facebook’s accessibility team that may not be true anymore. Today Facebook will be automatically describing the content of photos to blind and visually impaired users; the technology is called “automatic alternative text.”
The feature is coming to iOS today and later to Android and the web, will recognise objects in photos using machine learning, which helps to build artificial intelligences by using algorithms to make predictions. For instance if you show the software pictures of a cake and state that it is a cake in each picture, it will be able to identify cakes in future pictures. In the case of the iOS version, iPhone’s Voice feature will read the descriptions out loud.
Facebook’s scale is enormous: each day, users upload 2 billion photos across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. And so the accessibility team turned to Facebook’s artificial intelligence division, which is building software that recognizes images automatically.
“We need a solution to that problem if people who cannot see photos and understand what’s in them are going to be part of the community and get the same enjoyment and benefit out of the platform as the people who can.”
– Matt King, a Facebook engineer who is blind
By default, Facebook will only suggest a tag (such as “sky”, “selfie”, etc) for a photo if it is 80 percent confident that it knows what it’s looking at. But in sensitive cases — including ones involving race, — it will require a much higher level of confidence before offering a suggestion; Google had to apologise last year after its technology tagged two people as gorillas. When it isn’t confident, Facebook simply won’t suggest a description.
“In some cases, no data is better than bad data.”
– Jeff Wieland, head of Facebook’s Accessibility team.
While the technology has just been released, it marks a great and hopeful start towards making the internet more accessible to users with disabilities.
