Facebook launched a new “automatic alternative text” (AAT), which will describe images to people who are blind or visually impaired. If your friend posts a picture from her hiking trip, for example, the app will now be smart enough to recognize visual cues from the photo and say aloud, “Image may contain: two people, smiling, sunglasses, sky, outdoor [sic], water.”
It’s not the most evocative description of all time, but imagine using Facebook without any visual cues whatsoever. The social network works best when words and pictures combine to create meaning. Someone might caption a photo with the words “I can’t believe I did this!” — but if you can’t see the picture, you would have no idea if they were referring to eating an entire wedding cake or hitting a reindeer with their truck. Enabling the feature is easy, though you’ll need an iPhone or iPad to use it right now. To use it, ask Siri to “turn on VoiceOver,” a built-in iOS feature that describes out loud whatever is on your screen. You can also tap into Settings, then “General” and “Accessibility” to manually flip on VoiceOver.
Representatives for Facebook say the feature will come to other platforms in the near future.
-huffingtonpost-
