This latest, and perhaps most unexpected, move from Instagram will be a welcome development for those less able to interact with its almost entirely photo-based interface.
A recent official Instagram blog post details how the Facebook-owned social network aims to improve accessibility for the “285 million people in the world who have visual impairments” by introducing features designed to aid automatic audio descriptions of photographic content.
Many visually impaired people use assistive technologies such as screen readers which aim to translate visual information and text into audio descriptions. Most major operating systems, including Android and iOS, ship with some sort of screen reader built in, but these work best when applications are designed specifically with screen readers in mind.
Web browsers typically rely on ‘alternative text’ embedded in web pages to provide descriptive information to screen readers and Instagram is now introducing a feature whereby such descriptions will be generated automatically using object recognition technology. This will provide screen readers with the information they need to provide audio descriptions of objects found within photos as the user scrolls through their feed.
If you’d rather annotate your posts with your own hand-crafted alternative text descriptions, you’ll soon be able to use a new ‘Write Alt Text’ feature which will replace the automatically-generated text with your own.
Instagram’s own example shows a descriptive sentence many would consider too literal as a caption, but which would provide a clear description of the image for anyone unable to see it clearly. As an entirely new way of annotating posts, I’m sure users will also find other creative uses for the Alt Text field outside of its intended use.
Head to the Instagram Help Center for more details on these new features.
