Facebook now lets the visually impaired consume images using audio descriptions

Today Facebook launched a product that aims to make the Facebook experience better for the visually impaired. It’s called automatic alternative text, and is now available on iOS.

Engineered by the Facebook Accessibility Team, a division that works on new products specifically for people with disabilities, automatic alt text generates a description of a photo using advancements in object recognition technology. Worldwide, more than 39-million people are blind, and over 246-million have a severe visual impairment, claims Facebook.

Facebook notes that the blind and visually impaired may feel frustrated that they cannot appreciate and consume the visual content on Facebook, and this is where the idea to built automatic alt text originated.

“While visual content provides a fun and expressive way for people to communicate online, consuming and creating it poses challenges for people who are blind or severely visually impaired,” Facebook said in a blog post.

Facebook’s announcement comes a few days after Twitter announced a similar product to its users on Android and iOS.

An earlier version of the product allowed blind and visually impaired Facebook users to hear who shared the photo, but the new software will provide a more precise description of photographs. The image description will range from “image may contain three people, smiling, outdoors” to “this image may contain six people, child, close up”. The descriptions are not picture perfect but they give an idea of what the image is of.

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The company claims that the product can recognise the objects that are mostly shared on images. These objects include most transportation, nature, sports, food words and of course, a selfie. It can further describe a person’s appearance, whether the person in picture is a baby or wears eyeglasses, has a beard, or is smiling.

Visual content has become an intrinsic part of Facebook with about two billion photos uploaded daily, the company claims.

Users on iOS can test the technology today by turning on VoiceOver on their devices. The product is available to users in the US, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and is set to English. Facebook says that it hopes to add other languages to the functionality and will launch it to other platforms soon.