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With over 1 billion daily active users, Facebook has clearly done a good job of fulfilling its mission to make the world “more open and connected,” but its work is not yet done.
Starting today, Facebook is rolling out a new feature called Automatic Alternative Text that helps blind and visually impaired users better understand the photos being posted to their News Feed. With Automatic Alternative Text, Facebook will describe the content of these photos using the built-in voice synthesizer of iPhones. The overall goal of the project is to ensure that Facebook doesn’t overlook the 39 million blind and 246 million visually impaired individuals, especially as the service increasingly focuses on photos and videos.
“When Facebook says it wants to connect everyone, we really mean everyone,” said Matt King, an accessibility engineer at Facebook who joined the company in 2015 after a career at IBM. King, who is blind, knows firsthand the challenge of making technology accessible to people with disabilities. “You can’t draw people to your product if it’s a terrible experience.”
According to King, “tens of thousands” of blind and visually impaired users navigate Facebook with software that reads text aloud, much like users navigate other platforms. With an iPhone, you can turn on a screen reader (Siri) and enable VoiceOver. Similar programs are usually available for other platforms within the settings or accessibility menus.
Facebook is keen to emphasize that this technology is still in its early stages and not yet mature enough to replicate the ability to truly see the photos friends have posted. However, the feature represents an important first step in making Facebook more accessible to more people.
To be fair, Facebook is certainly not the only tech giant trying to improve the basic experience for blind or visually impaired individuals. Twitter also launched a feature in late March that allows users to manually add text descriptions to photos uploaded to the social network, enabling screen readers to then read these descriptions aloud. Microsoft is also working on this front.
Pubblicato in Social Media
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