Naquela Wright’s life took an unexpected turn when she lost her eyesight as a teenager, but even when her world became dark, the New Jersey resident didn’t want to quit social media.
Using Facebook was a challenge at first. Diagnosed in 2010 with pseudotumor cerebri, a rare health condition in which pressure increases around the brain and can result in the loss of vision, Wright learned how to use a screen reader to read the site through the touch of the keyboard and sound of a robotic voice. Still, when a friend sends her a photo, Wright often has no clue what the image shows.
Now Facebook is trying to solve this problem by exploiting the power of artificial intelligence to create new tools that not only describe items in a photo but allows users to ask what’s in an image.
“I can have a basic picture in my mind of what’s going on in the picture and now I can comment on my own,” said Wright, who got to try out the new tools that are still being tested. “Of course, it’s different, but it’s something more than I had.”
An estimated 285 million people are visually disabled globally, according to the World Health Organization, and research conducted by Facebook showed that blind users have trouble figuring out what’s in a photo because the description isn’t clear or doesn’t exist.
Facebook has made it easier to skim through the content on its website with a screen reader by improving HTML headings, adding alternative text for images, launching keyboard shortcuts, and more. Using artificial intelligence to describe photos is only a part of these ongoing efforts.
With 1.5 billion users, Facebook isn’t the only social media company that wants to improve its website for the visually disabled. Along with Facebook and other major tech firms, Twitter and LinkedIn have their own accessibility teams and belong to an initiative called “Teaching Accessibility”.
Jeff Wieland, Facebook’s head of accessibility engineering, said the group wants to educate more engineers, especially early in college, about designing products that are compatible with the disabled and others. “We really don’t want accessibility to be the luxury of a handful of companies,” Wieland said. “We want everything around the world to be built with accessibility in mind.”
【小题1】What tool helps the visually disabled to read Facebook?| A．A screen reader. | B．A special keyboard. |
| C．A helpful robot. | D．HTML headings. |
| A．It adds a lot of shortcuts on the keyboard. |
| B．It helps users to employ their senses other than sight. |
| C．It meets no competitors with its advanced technology. |
| D．It inspires more engineers to explore artificial intelligence. |
| A．are unaffordable to | B．bring harm to |
| C．keep company of | D．well suit |
| A．Screen reader: tool to access social media |
| B．Ongoing efforts: strength to improve websites |
| C．Artificial intelligence: power to help the blind |
| D．Teaching accessibility: initiative to educate engineers |
