[Nfbf-l] FW: ] Facebook's Automatic Alternative Text Product Launch

Wed Apr 6 17:09:17 UTC 2016

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Kelly Gasque via leadership  <leadership at acblists.org>
To: leadership at acblists.org
Date: Tuesday, April 5, 2016 10:36 am
Subject: [leadership] Facebook's Automatic Alternative Text Product Launch

 To learn more, visit: https://code.facebook.com/posts/457605107772545.
 Automatic Alternative Text Product Launch
 Photos on Facebook
 Every day, people share more than 2 billion photos across Facebook,
Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. That's a lot of photos! 

 While visual content provides a fun and expressive way for people to
communicate online, consuming and creating it poses challenges for people
who are blind or severely visually impaired. As a result, some people may
feel frustrated and excluded because they cannot fully participate in the
conversations around photos that take place on Facebook.

 Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected. This
means that we want everyone to have equal access to connect with others.
Worldwide, more than 39 million people are blind, and over 246 million have
a severe visual impairment. As Facebook becomes an increasingly visual
experience, we hope our new automatic alternative text technology will help
the blind community experience Facebook the same way others enjoy it. 
 What is automatic alternative text?
 Automatic alternative text, or automatic alt text, is a new development
that generates a description of a photo using advancements in object
recognition technology. People using screen readers on iOS devices will hear
a list of items a photo may contain as they swipe past photos on 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.

 While this technology is still nascent, tapping its current capabilities
to describe photos is a huge step toward providing our visually impaired
community the same benefits and enjoyment that everyone else gets from
photos. 

 We are testing this feature first on iOS screen readers set to English,
but we plan to add this functionality to other languages and platforms soon.

 Try it yourself
 You can try this technology for yourself. On an iOS device, enable
VoiceOver by asking Siri to turn on VoiceOver, or by tapping on Settings >
General  Accessibility  VoiceOver. Once enabled, you can open the Facebook
app and swipe to scroll through your News Feed or a profile. When you swipe
past a photo, you'll hear this technology tell you some of the items the
photo may contain. 
 AI-Powered tech Facebook's object recognition technology processes images
uploaded to
Facebook and our family of apps. The technology is based on a neural network
that has billions of parameters and is trained with millions of examples.
Each advancement in object recognition technology means that the Facebook
Accessibility team will be able to make technology even more accessible for
more people. 
 What objects are recognized? 
 We have started by identifying objects that are commonly shared on
Facebook. Here are some of the items that can be identified by our system:
 Transportation words: Car, Boat, Airplane, Bicycle, Train, Road,
Motorcycle, Bus
 Nature words: Outdoor, Mountain, Tree, Snow, Sky, Ocean, Water, Beach,
Wave, Sun, Grass
 Sports words: Tennis, Swimming, Stadium, Basketball, Baseball, Golf
 Food words: Ice Cream, Sushi, Pizza, Dessert, Coffee
 Words that help describe someone's appearance: Baby, Eyeglasses, Beard,
Smiling, Jewelry, Shoes
 And, of course, Selfie! 
 Getting it right
 We don't want to make mistakes that create a negative experience for the
very people we're hoping to help. We are careful to only include items where
we believe there is a high degree of precision and accuracy. We are
committed to building and iterating on this technology so we can expand our
photo descriptions. 
 The Backstory
 The idea for an automatic photo captioning system came from interviews
with people in our community who have visual impairments. They told us what
it was like when their friends shared photos on Facebook, and we decided to
improve this experience. The Core Data Science team initiated this project,
but quickly gained support from a wide range of teams and organizations
within Facebook, including the Facebook Accessibility team, the Applied
Machine Learning team, the User Experience Research team, and iOS
engineering.
 Facebook's Accessibility Team
 The Facebook Accessibility team began five years ago to help make
Facebook's existing products usable by everyone. Now the team also works on
new products specifical

 ly for people with disabilities. Automatic alt text is part of our effort
to improve Facebook for people with blindness and vision loss, but the team
has made progress in helping people with other disabilities including
providing closed captions to help people who are deaf or hearing impaired,
and ensuring Facebook can be used by people with limited mobility who use
eye-tracking devices. 

 Facebook is also committed to making improvements that help the whole
field of tech accessibility. We created the Accessibility Toolkit, a public
resource covering best practices for designing and implementing an
accessibility program. React, Facebook's open source front-end framework for
building web and mobile products, supports accessibility, and Facebook is a
contributor to the Accessibile Rich Internet Application (ARIA) standard.

 For more information about the Accessibility Team, please visit:
facebook.com/accessibility 

> Matt King, Accessibility Specialist
 Matt King lost his vision as a sophomore electrical engineering student at
the University of Notre Dame. Thus began a life-long focus on making
technology accessible to everyone. He spent 25 years at IBM combining his
passion for technology and accessibility before joining the Facebook team
last year. Now, Matt works on products like automatic alternative text, and
he helps advance industry standards for accessibility as a W3C editor and
ARIA Authoring Practices task force chair. As a three-time Paralympian with
a world record in tandem track cycling, Matt is passionate about sharing his
message that disability is not a reason for expecting less from life or from
one another.

> Kelly Gasque
> American Council of the Blind
> 1703 N Beauregard Street, Suite 420
> Alexandria, VA 22311
> (T) 202-467-5081
> (F) 703-465-5085
> Learn more about us at www.acb.org
> Follow us on Twitter at @acbnational
> Like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/AmericanCounciloftheBlindOfficial
>  

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Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
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