Facebook is developing a technology that will help the blind community experience Facebook the same way others enjoy it. While visual content provides a fun way for people to communicate online, consuming and creating it poses challenges for people who are blind or severely visually impaired.

Facebook's response is 'automatic alternative text.'

The new development 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 Facebook 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."

This is possible because of Facebook’s object recognition technology, which is based on a neural network that has billions of parameters and is trained with millions of examples.

Facebook is launching automatic alt text first on iOS screen readers set to English, but plans to add this functionality for other languages and platforms soon.