AI to “help blind people see”
For people who are blind or have low vision, the internet can be difficult to navigate. There’s a lot of content that’s primarily visual. Unless website owners label their images with text, visually impaired users will have difficulties reading it.
Thanks to automatic image text recognition, Google’s Chrome browser has introduced a new feature. With this feature the user would recieve information on what an image is about. Find images for your blog posts on our website.
“The unfortunate situation now is that there are still millions and millions of untagged images on the web,” said Laura Allen, senior program manager for the Chrome accessibility team. She understands the issue, as she has low vision herself. “When you’re navigating on a screen reader or on a Braille screen, when you get to one of those images, you’ll hear essentially ‘image’ or ‘untagged graphic’ or your favorite, a very long string of numbers that is the file name, which is completely irrelevant. “
An example of descriptive text given by the feature would be “appears to be fruits and vegetables in the marketplace” for an image of a shopping mall. Descriptions are visible with “appears to be” so users know that they are generated by a computer algorithm.
The features of the app are only accessible by those who use screen readers that output verbal comments or Braille. The user can read descriptions of the images as per usual, but most importantly, they won’t be visible for display on your device.
To enable image descriptions in Chrome, go to Settings and then Advanced at the bottom of the settings page. Locate the “Accessibility” section and enable “Get image descriptions from Google”. The user can also enable the feature for individual web pages by right-clicking to bring up the context menu and selecting “Get image descriptions from Google”.
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Author: PC-GR
The World of Technology
