Facebook Adds Automatic Alt Text AI Reader on iOS

[engine]

Facebook has added an automatic AI reader for iOS users to describe photos to help people using screen readers. Previously, users of screen readers only heard the name of the person sharing, followed by, "photo," but now news feed images will include the description of what is seen in the image. Currently being rolled out in English and on iOS, there are plans to extend this to other platforms and langauges.

Our goal is to algorithmically generate useful and accurate descriptions of photos in a way that works on a much larger scale without latency in the user experience. We provide these descriptions as image alt text, an HTML attribute designed for content managers to provide text alternatives for images. Since alt text is part of the W3C accessibility standards, any screen reader software can pick it up and read it out to people when they move the screen reader's reading cursor to an image.

[code.facebook.com...]

[tangor]

Working ever closer to those Star Trek computers (all voice).