80% of Web Content Will Likely Be Accessible to People Who Are Blind by 2020
With visual content being a huge component of online and social media experiences, people who are blind or who have visual impairments are left unable to participate. Thanks to advances in AI, great strides will be made in web content accessibility for people with disabilities over the next few years. First up is Facebook making images accessible to people who are blind or who have visual impairments. The platform’s servers can now decode and describe images uploaded to the site in a way that can be read aloud by screenreader software. In the past, this software only allowed blind people to read “text,” but thanks to technological advancements, visually impared users can hear things like, “Image may contain three people, smiling, outdoors” when they scroll past a picture. Facebook says it has trained its software to recognize about 80 familiar objects and activities. Then, it adds the descriptions as alternative text, or alt text, on each photo. The more images it scans, the more sophisticated the software will become. This new AI technology will now be available across the company’s products like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. The company said it plans to expand the feature in other languages and platforms soon.
