Facebook launches Automatic Alternative text

Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected. This means that we want everyone to have equal access to connect with others. Worldwide, more than 39 million people are blind and over 246 million have a severe visual impairment. As Facebook becomes an increasingly visual experience, we hope our new automatic alternative text technology will help the blind community experience Facebook the same way others enjoy it.

What is automatic alternative text?

Automatic alternative text, or automatic alt text, is a new development that generates a description of a photo, using advancements in object recognition technology. People using screen readers on iOS devices will hear a list of items a photo may contain, as they swipe past photos on Facebook. Before today, 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 is in a photo thanks to automatic alt text. For instance, someone could now hear, “Image may contain three people, smiling, outdoors.”

While this technology is still nascent, tapping its current capabilities to describe photos is a huge step toward providing our visually impaired community the same benefits and enjoyment that everyone else gets from photos.

We are testing this feature first on iOS screen readers set to English, but we plan to add this functionality to other languages and platforms soon.

Try it yourself

You can try this technology for yourself. On an iOS device, enable VoiceOver by asking Siri to “turn on VoiceOver,” or by tapping on Settings > General > Accessibility > VoiceOver. Once enabled, you can open the Facebook app and swipe to scroll through your News Feed or a profile. When you swipe past a photo, you’ll hear this technology tell you some of the items the photo may contain.

AI-Powered tech

Facebook’s object recognition technology processes images uploaded to Facebook and our family of apps. The technology is based on a neural network that has billions of parameters and is trained with millions of examples. Each advancement in object recognition technology means that the Facebook Accessibility team will be able to make technology even more accessible for more people.

What objects are recognised?

We have started by identifying objects that are commonly shared on Facebook. Here are some of the items that can be identified by our system:

• transportation words: car, boat, airplane, bicycle, train, road, motorcycle, bus

• nature words: outdoor, mountain, tree, snow, sky, ocean, water, beach, wave, sun, grass
• sports words: tennis, swimming, stadium, basketball, baseball, golf
• food words: ice cream, sushi, pizza, dessert, coffee
• words that help describe someone’s appearance: baby, eyeglasses, beard, smiling, jewelry, shoes

• and, of course, selfie!

Facebook is also committed to making improvements that help the whole field of tech accessibility. We created the Accessibility Toolkit, a public resource covering best practices for designing and implementing an accessibility program. React, Facebook’s open source front-end framework for building web and mobile products, supports accessibility, and Facebook is a contributor to the Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) standard.

For more information, go to www.facebook.com/accessibility.