Facebook has unveiled a new feature called automatic alternative tool, describing the content of photos to blind and visually impaired users.

The new feature relies on Facebook’s visual recognition engine, an artificial intelligence-powered technology that processes every single photo and video uploaded to the social network. The company has trained the engine to recognize dozens of stuff including car, mountain, tree, sunset, basketball court, ice cream, pizza. Automatic alt text then mentions the items in the special captions it generates for the blind. Machine learning helps to build artificial intelligence by using algorithms to make predictions.

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It will let blind users to join conversations they were previously left out of. The new feature offers same information for blinded people, which is especially important to young blind users whose peers live on social media.

The people behind the new helpful feature was introduced by Facebook’s accessibility team, a division of the company created five years ago to help the social network develop products for disabled users. The division is lead by Matt King, an accessibility specialist in user interface engineering.

The automatic alternative tool will feature around 100 concepts, which can be identified with accuracy of between 80- and 90 percent. A conservative approach is being used to add more items, which focuses on precision rather than quantity to avoid misleading visually impaired users.

The feature will be available to iOS users. Facebook plans to bring it to Android devices and desktop users in the future. The tool will be in English, and other languages will follow later on. Presently, automatic alt text for Facebook is only available in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

To check out the new technology, users can go to to Settings > General > Accessibility, and activate VoiceOver.

TagsFacebook, AI, automatic alternative tool, automatic alternative tool blind users, visual impairment