Facebook’s Working On A Tool To Help The Blind “See” Images

„Facebook connects 1.5 billion people all over the world, but for the blind and visually impaired, it can be difficult to gain access to what has become a vast platform for connectivity. That’s where Facebook’s accessibility team, led by Jeff Wieland, comes in. The sole purpose of the accessibility team is to help people with disabilities have a seamless experience on Facebook, and ultimately help the social network achieve its mission of connecting the world.

Right now, blind and visually impaired people who have access to screen readers — tools used to identify what’s displayed on a screen — can listen to what people are writing on Facebook, but there’s currently no way to figure out what’s going on in the millions of photos shared on Facebook every day.
“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,” Matt King, Facebook’s first blind engineer, told TechCrunch. “So for somebody like myself, it can be really like, ‘Ok, what’s going on here? What’s the discussion all about?’”