Facebook is using artificial intelligence to describe photos for blind users ZDNet

Facebook is using AI to help describe images posted by users. Facebook's iOS app is using object recognition technology to give blind people an audio breakdown of what's going on in photos posted on the social network. The new accessibility feature, rolling out today, could be a major improvement on existing screen readers, which largely focus on text. Until now, when blind users were checking their Facebook newsfeed and came across an image, they would only hear the word "photo" and the name of the person who shared it, which left the user still dependent on friends and family to interpret an image. To improve the experience for blind people, Facebook has used its vast trove of user images to train a deep neural network that drives a computer vision system built to recognise objects in images.