Automatic Alternative Text - Facebook Accessibility

Accessibility on smartphones for the visually impaired has continued to improve in recent years. iOS has many features to aid in the usability of smartphones and recently Facebook has come out with a new one. Facebook has launched a new feature to describe a photo's contents to the visually impaired user. The feature uses something called automatic alternative text which is used to give a basic description of the photo using key words the screen reader finds to describe the setting, color, and content of the photo. In the past, the screen reader for Facebook could only tell the user there was a photo in the post or status, but now the user can further understand the content of the post using this new screen reader feature. For example if someone post a photo of themselves with their family on the beach, the screen reader would read your caption long with keywords like: "sky, sea, outdoor, 4 people, ect."

Accessibility features like this are very important because there are more than 39 million people in the world who are blind and 246 million who have severe visual impairment (Facebook). Advances in "object recognition technology" has allowed Facebook to develop this type of feature. The program was fed millions of photos as examples pertaining to a certain subject such a "ocean" so that the program learned to recognize them. This is called a neural network, a way to train computers to think and make decisions on their own. Neural networks have billions of parameters to determine what object is what, similar to the way our brains work. 

When there are nearly 2 billion photos being shared online right now, this technology is keeping us all connected  and - as Facebook puts it - "When people are connected, they can achieve extraordinary things as individuals and as a community - and when everyone is connected, we all benefit."

http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/04/using-artificial-intelligence-to-help-blind-people-see-facebook/
http://www.engadget.com/2016/04/05/facebook-automatic-alternative-text/