This Is How Instagram Describes Photos To Visually Impaired Users

Instagram wants to improve its platform’s user experience for visually impaired people, so it has decided to add two new features that create descriptions of posts.

The all-new accessibility-focused update that’s rolling out starting Wednesday comes with the features that provide visually impaired users text descriptions of what’s happening in the posts shown in the Feed, Explore and Profile sections of the app.

“We are introducing two new improvements to make it easier for people with visual impairments to use Instagram. With more than 285 million people in the world who have visual impairments, we know there are many people who could benefit from a more accessible Instagram,” the Facebook-owned company stated in a press release.

The first feature that’s being added to the photo- and video-sharing social networking service creates automatic alternative text that is then read out loud by existing screen readers. According to Instagram, this feature utilizes object recognition technology to generate text descriptions for photos.

The alternative text feature basically list items found in photos that visually impaired users encounter as they browse the app. Since the descriptions are generated using artificial intelligence (AI), users shouldn’t expect vivid statements. The descriptions are expected to be a tad rudimentary. But it’s still a practical way to provide context for the numerous images on the platform, according to Engadget.

The second feature involves users who do not have vision problems. It gives them the option to write alternative text for the photos they upload on Instagram. This way of generating descriptions would be more useful, since human-written text tend to be more detailed than those made using AI.

Instagram disclosed that it has more plans to improve accessibility of its platform moving forward. However, it did not say what these plans are. From the looks of things, Instagram is following its parent company Facebook that has been working on improving the accessibility of its platforms in the recent years. If fact, Facebook’s mobile apps already have alt text and closed captions to live videos for users with impairments.