Facebook is coming to the aid of blind and visually impaired members by developing a tool which will enable them to ‘see’ images shared on the social networking platform. At present such users are restricted to a voice translation of comments written on the platform but pictures have remained dark until now. To fix this Facebook’s engineers are building an artificial intelligence- based object recognition algorithm which can scan images and make sense of what is depicted, relaying its findings to the user. The software is the brainchild of Facebook’s first blind engineer, Matt King, who told TechCrunch: “You just think about how much of your news feed is visual — and is probably most of it — and so often people will make a comment about a photo or they’ll say something about it when they post it, but they won’t really tell you what is in the photo.” To remedy this King’s improved screen reader is able to generate a new description of posted images, listing the key elements it believes to be visible such as ‘nature’, ‘people’, ‘plant’ and ‘cloud’ – although accuracy still has a way to travel yet.
Facebook has developed a tool which will help people with ﻿visual impairments 'see' images on the company's social networking platform. The new feature is called "image search" and it allows users to search for specific pictures or videos by using their eyes instead of keyboards.