Facebook has launched significant updates to its Automatic Alt Text (AAT) accessibility tool to provide a richer experience and improve the depth and detail of photo descriptions for people who are blind and visually impaired.
With photo sharing becoming one of the most popular ways to communicate — including for individuals who are blind or visually impaired – AAT is one of the many investments by Facebook to better support communities and ensure everyone can participate in conversations online.
First introduced in 2016, AAT leverages artificial intelligence to automatically generate descriptions for people using screen readers, with the assistive technology converting text and other on-screen elements to speech.
The latest version of Facebook’s AAT tool includes numerous technological advances to improve a user’s photo experience. This includes increasing the number of objects and concepts that AAT can reliably recognize in photos on Instagram and Facebook by more than 10 times to over 1,200, meaning more photos will feature descriptions.
Further, AAT now identifies activities, landmarks, and types of animals, enabling more thorough descriptions — for example, “May be a selfie of 2 people, outdoors, the Leaning Tower of Pisa.”
Because Automatic Alt Text descriptions are phrased simply, they are all available in 45 different languages.
And in an industry first, AAT on Facebook makes it possible to include detailed information such as the position of objects in a photo (top, middle, bottom or left, center, right) and their relative size. AAT can now specify that there are two people in the center of the photo and three others in the background. The detailed image description can be accessed with a long press on a photo in Android and with a ‘custom action’ on a photo in iOS.
AAT is now available in Thailand for photos on Facebook in News Feed, profiles, Groups, and shown when a photo is open in “Detail” view. Meanwhile, Instagram’s AAT now features the larger recognized set of objects and concepts and continues to offer written and spoken descriptions of photos in Feed, Explore and Profile.
Read more about how Facebook leverages advances in AI to power these improvements at here.
