Facebook announced an update on Tuesday, January 19, 2021, that it has successfully improved its artificial intelligence technology on its Automatic Alt Text (AAT). Following this, visually impaired and blind users will gain access to better quality and detail of photo captions and descriptions.
According to Tech Crunch, Alt Text is a type of field within a photograph’s metadata that helps provide descriptions of its content. This allows the image to be heard and understood even by individuals who cannot actually see the picture.
Facebook first unveiled the said technology in 2016. It leverages computer vision technology to generate captions for users. Since it first launched on the social networking platform, the team behind Facebook has released numerous updates to make the service better for users.
In its article, Tech Crunch reveals that the system is now capable of recognizing more items and concepts, all of which now clocks in at 1,200. Moreover, the captions have also improved, with these providing more insight and detail pertaining to the actual architecture, number of persons, and the like.
With the latest updates made by Facebook on its AAT, ZD Net states that its artificial intelligence technology is able to give descriptions not only of animals, landmarks, activities, different types of food, and more. Some of the captions may now read, “a selfie of two people, outdoors, the Leaning Tower of Pisa” rather than just a simple description of “an image of two people.”
To make these improvements possible, the Facebook team said it needed to train the two-stage object detector via an open-source platform, reports ZD Net.
In a statement, it said, “We trained the models to predict locations and semantic labels of the objects within an image. Multilabel/multi-data set training techniques helped make our model more reliable with the larger space.”
“Taken together, these advancements help users who are blind or visually impaired better understand what’s in photos posted by their family and friends – and in their own photos – by providing more (and more detailed) information,” said Facebook in its blog.
While the update first rolled out on the Facebook platform, the same feature is also slated to be available on Facebook-owned Instagram.
Based on the article by Tech Crunch, the captions will be made simple so these can be made available to people and users from around the world and in varying languages to cater to a wide audience. However, the new update may not be made available to countries covered all at the same time.