The mission of the FACEBOOK is to make the world open and stay connected with the people. That means the people who are impaired with vision disabilities can have an opportunity to get latest updated. Worldwide, more than 39 million people are blind, and over 246 million have a severe impairment.
CARL AUGUSTO is the president and CEO for AMERICAN FOUNDATION FOR THE BLIND (AFB) which is a non-profit organization. AFB's priorities are to work with FACEBOOK team for broad using of technology for the visually impaired people.
WANT TO KNOW HOW BLIND PEOPLE ACCESS FACEBOOK? HERE THE STORY BEGINS.
You may be wondering how people with vision loss use computers or surf the web. The answer is quite simple: People who are blind or visually impaired use a screen magnification program to enlarge fonts in order to optimize the screen for reading, or they use a screen reading program that reads the text aloud. These are quick, efficient and helpful solutions that is, if the websites and computer programs are properly designed.
Facebook accessibility specialist and engineer MATT KING lost his vision completely in college. When he joined our accessibility team after more than 20 years in the accessibility field one of the projects he was most excited to work on centered on using object recognition technology to automatically describe photos for people who are not able to see those photos. Today, with our launch of automatic alternative text, we're taking an important step towards achieving that goal.
AUTOMATIC ALTERNATIVE TEXT, or automatic alt text, is a new feature that generates a description of a photo through object recognition technology for someone who cannot see the photo. Before today, people who are visually impaired could only hear the name of the person who posted the photo as they scrolled past photos on FACEBOOK. Now, if they're using a screen reader on IOS, they'll hear a richer description of the photo thanks to automatic alt text. For example, for a group photo on the beach, a person using a screen reader on IOS would now hear, "This image may contain : Three people, smiling, outdoors." We are rolling this out in English over the few weeks and will add more languages. The FACEBOOK is also working for this facility that should be available on ANDRIOD and WINDOWS.
HERE's the video by FACEBOOK ACCESSIBILITY