Many of us take our sight for granted. We see photos posted on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and etc., and sure we might make fun of some photos, complain about some, but there are some who are blind or visually impaired who are unable to partake in the experience.
While there are accessibility tools out there, and many smartphone makers have included such features in their phones, Facebook is doing something about it by releasing a tool that helps the blind “see” photos. This is a feature offered to iOS owners and if you use a screen reader, it will now be able to describe photos to the user.
According to 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’s in a photo thanks to automatic alt text. For instance, someone could now hear, ‘Image may contain three people, smiling, outdoors.’”
For now the feature will be limited to iOS devices and only for English users, but Facebook expects that they will eventually expand it to other platforms and for other languages in the future.