Every day more than 2,000 million share photos via Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Messenger.
The visual content allows people a form of online fun and original communication, but consumption and creation of content that is a challenge for the blind or severely visually impaired people. Some of these people may feel frustrated and excluded unable to participate fully in Facebook conversations that revolve around images.
Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected. This means that we want everyone to have the same opportunities to connect with others. Worldwide, more than 39 million people are blind, and 246 million suffer severe vision problems. Facebook provides an increasingly visual experience, and we hope that this new technology alternative AutoText help the community of blind people can also experience and enjoy the platform in this regard.
The automatic text alternative is a new development that generates a description of a photograph, using advances in technology object recognition. When moving from one image to another, people who use screen readers on iOS devices hear a list of items that may contain each photo. So far, when they were with a photo in its section of Ultimas Noticias, people using screen readers only heard the name of the person who shared the photo, followed by the term "picture." Now, thanks to automatic text alternative, we can provide a more detailed description of what is in an image description. For example, you can hear texts like ". The image can contain three people, smiling, outdoors.'
Although it is a very new technology, the fact leverage their current ability to describe pictures is a big step in our goal of providing the visually impaired community, the same benefits from the pictures; they enjoy other people.
It is being tested this functionality in iOS screen readers that are configured in English, but soon this technology will be added to more languages and platforms.
You can try this technology yourself. In an iOS device enable VoiceOver asking Siri "activate VoiceOver" or by tapping Settings> General> Accessibility> VoiceOver. Once activated, you can open the Facebook application and slide your finger to scroll through your latest news section or profile. When you go to a photo, you will hear this technology, telling some of the items may contain.
Technology object recognition processes uploaded to Facebook Family Facebook applications (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Messenger) images. The technology is based on a neural network that has billions of parameters and has been trained with millions of examples. Every advance in technology object recognition means that the equipment Accessibility Facebook will be able to make the technology even more accessible to more people.
What objects recognized? It started with the identification of objects that most often share on Facebook. These are some of the elements that the system can identify:
· Transport related words: car, boat, airplane, bicycle, train, road, Moto, Bus
· Nature: Outdoors, Mountain, Tree, Snow, Sky, Ocean, Water, Beach, Wave, Sun, Grass
· Sports: Tennis, Swimming, Stadium, Basketball, Baseball, Golf
· Food: Ice cream, Sushi, Pizza, Dessert, Café
· Words the help describe the appearance of a person: Baby, Glasse, Beard,
· And of course, the word "selfie."
You do not want to make mistakes that create a negative experience for those people who want to help. They are careful and include only those elements that are sure there is a high degree of precision and accuracy. They are committed to continuing creating and iteration in this technology so that it can expand the descriptions of the photos.
The idea of an automatic captioning photo comes from interviews with people in the community who are visually impaired. They spoke of those times when your friends shared photos on Facebook and decided to improve this experience. The Core Data Science Team started this project, but quickly gained the support of more teams and organizations within Facebook, as the Accessibility Team, the Applied Machine Learning Team, the User Experience Research Team and the team of engineers iOS.
Accessibility Team Facebook was created five years ago to help Facebook products could be used by anyone. Now the team is also working on products created specifically for people with disabilities. The alternative automatic text is part of its effort to improve Facebook for the blind or severely impaired vision people, but the accessibility team has made great efforts also help people with other disabilities, including providing captions for deafness or hearing, or ensuring that Facebook can be used by people with disabilities who use eye-tracking devices disabilities.
Facebook is also committed to making improvements that help throughout the field of technology for accessibility.Accessibility has been created Toolkit (accessibility toolkit), a public resource that offers best practices for the design and implementation of an accessibility program. React, open source infrastructure to build the web and mobile products support accessibility, and Facebook contributes to the standard of Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA).
Post a Comment