Tech

Artificial Intelligence now translating Facebook photos for the blind

Published

8 years ago

April 6, 2016

Artificial Intelligence now translating Facebook photos for the blind

In what seems to be an exciting development, Facebook is now using Artificial Intelligence to translate photos for the blind.

AI will now be used to generate text captions for every photo on Facebook, to provide much-needed accessibility for the blind or visually impaired.

Because the developers wanted the text generated by the A.I. to be extremely accurate, they trained it intensively on images of just 100 different types of object, so at present it is limited to identifying human, pizza, baseball and the like, but as research progresses the captions will get increasingly versatile and complex.

To surf the internet, the visually impaired often rely on screen readers, which dictate words on the screen.

However, screen readers are only as good as the content they can read. If text is missing, they can’t read it.

Web standards dictate that images should have a field called alt text, describing in words what the image depicts. However, on most Facebook images, the only text available for screen readers is the status posted along with the photos.

By applying artificial intelligence algorithms, Facebook is able to scan each image and pull out some information about what it depicts. If someone posts a picture of a pizza, the algorithm will be able to automatically put the word “pizza” into the alt text of the image, so the screen reader can tell it to the user.

The captions won’t be seen by most of the social network’s 1.5 billion users, but it marks a shift for those who can’t see photos on an increasingly visual platform.

Join the conversation

Opinions

Support Ripples Nigeria, hold up solutions journalism

Balanced, fearless journalism driven by data comes at huge financial costs.

As a media platform, we hold leadership accountable and will not trade the right to press freedom and free speech for a piece of cake.

If you like what we do, and are ready to uphold solutions journalism, kindly donate to the Ripples Nigeria cause.

Your support would help to ensure that citizens and institutions continue to have free access to credible and reliable information for societal development.

Donate Now