Facebook Launches New Tool That Helps Blind People See

Facebook Launches New Tool That Helps Blind People See

Blind and visually impaired Facebook fans will now be able to “see” photos on the site according to Tech Crunch:

Facebook has launched a tool, Automatic Alternative Text, for blind and visually impaired people to “see” images on the site. For people using screen readers to identify what’s displayed, AAT uses object recognition technology to generate descriptions of photos on Facebook. This tool, led by Facebook’s accessibility team, has been several months in the making.

“You just think about how much of your news feed is visual — and most of it probably is — and so often people will make a comment about a photo or they’ll say something about it when they post it, but they won’t really tell you what is in the photo,” Matt King, Facebook’s first blind engineer, told me back in October. “So for somebody like myself, it can be really like, ‘Ok, what’s going on here? What’s the discussion all about?’”

This is awesome!

Automatic Alternative Text