In 2016, Facebook announced new features towards a more accessible social network. They announced that Facebook will use Artificial Intelligence to provide text descriptions of photos for the visually impaired people. However, Instagram – Facebook-owned, photo and video-sharing social network did not have these features implemented back then.
Today, Instagram has announced that it will increase accessibility by introducing two new improvements to make it easier for people with visual impairments to use the social network.
Similarly to what Facebook has already had, the new AI-based feature will provide text descriptions for photos to be automatically generated. The so-called automatic alternative text will be generated using object recognition technology developed at Facebook.
Together with this, a second feature is added to Instagram – custom alternative text. This will allow people to add a richer description when uploading a photo to make Instagram more accessible. According to the announcement in Instagram’s blog post, if there is no custom alternative text added, only in that case Instagram will automatically generate alternative description using its AI-based feature.
There are more than 285 million visually impaired people in the world today. With Instagram being one of the most popular and fast-growing social media, a great number of people will benefit from these new features. The social network announced that these are only the first steps towards a more accessible Instagram. Many more are to be expected in the future.
