Every day, people share more than 2 billion photos across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
You are sitting there and enjoying the pics or video that was shared by your friends but have you ever thought about all the blind people around the world.They should also experience the fun that is derived from a video or photo that is shared on facebook.Why should you have all the fun?
Ok, I think I made you feel guilty about using facebook now 😛
Don’t worry, Facebook has found a solution for this problem.
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. So facebook wanted to build technology that helps the blind community experience Facebook the same way others enjoy it.
Now, I am going to get a little technical.Facebook has combined deep learning and image recognition technology to create a solution called the automatic alternative text (or automatic alt text).This technology generates a description of a photo using advancements in object recognition technology.
Before this technology was developed, people using screen readers would only hear the name of the person who shared the photo, followed by the term “photo” when they came upon an image in News Feed. Now we can offer a richer description of what’s in a photo thanks to automatic alt text.For instance, someone could hear, “Image contains five people, dancing.”
Just like a baby needs to be trained on everything from scratch, the object recognition technology, which is based on a neural network that has billions of parameters is trained with millions of examples.
Do you know what this means?
Now facebook be accessible to the 39 million people who are blind, and over 246 million who have a severe visual impairment.When people are connected, they can achieve extraordinary things as individuals and as a community — and when everyone is connected, we all benefit.
Facebook is launching automatic alt text first on iOS screen readers set to English, but they plan to add this functionality for other languages and platforms soon. While this technology is still nascent, tapping its current capabilities to describe photos is an important step toward providing the visually impaired community the same benefits and enjoyment that everyone else gets from photos.
I did some digging on this and found some traces of this technology on my facebook account too.
Facebook Computer Vision Tags
If you are curious to know what information Facebook visual recognition algorithms have found in your own pictures, here’s an easy way to view that data.
- Open any photograph on the Facebook website and click the thumbnail to view the enlarged version of the image.
- Right-click the image and choose Inspect to open the Chrome Dev Tools. This trick would work across all modern browsers since they have developer tools built-in.
- Look at the alt attribute of the image tag* and you’ll find the description of the image as seen by Facebook (video tutorial).
[*] If the <img> tag is not visible in developer tool, you may need to expand the parent <div> tag.
Video Tutorial – Facebook Technology For The Blind (Image Tags)
Thus far, however, it sounds like great strides have been taken to help make Facebook more accessible for everyone.
Before we conclude let’s hear it from Mark Zuckerberg talking with engineers about AI and helping blind people experience photos.
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/10102801434799001/
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