Facebook lets blind people ‘see’ its photos

Facebook is launching a system which can “read” photos and tell visually impaired people what appears in them.
The internet is changing. From a medium based almost entirely on text, it is now becoming increasingly picture-led. An estimated 1.8 billion images are uploaded every day to social networks such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
Using artificial intelligence (AI), Facebook’s servers can now decode and describe images uploaded to the site and provide them in a form that can be read out by a screenreader.
Facebook says it has now trained its software to recognize about 80 familiar objects and activities. It adds the descriptions as alternative text, or alt text, on each photo. The more images it scans, the more sophisticated the software will become.