San Francisco: In an important feature, especially for blind and people with low vision, tech giant Microsoft is adding a new feature to its Edge browser that will automatically add “Alt Text” to unlabelled images.
Alternative Text or simply alt text or image label is added by web developers to describe images, charts and graphics. However Microsoft found more than half of the images on the web are missing alt text.
Screen readers currently read out “unlabelled graphic” if there’s no description of an image. The issue will be addressed by the latest feature using modern image-recognition technology and added to Edge browser, Microsoft said in a video blog.
“When a screen reader finds an image without a label, that image can be automatically processed by Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to describe the image in words and capture any text it contains,” Travis Leithead, a program manager on Microsoft’s Edge platform team, said in the video.
“The algorithms are not perfect, and the quality of the descriptions will vary, but for users of screen readers, having some description for an image is often better than no context at all”, she added.
“After the user has granted permission, Microsoft Edge will send unlabelled images to Azure Cognitive Services’ Computer Vision API for processing. Most common web image formats are supported (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, etc)", Microsoft said.
"The Vision API can analyze images and create descriptive summaries in 5 languages, and recognize text inside of images in over 120 languages”, it added.
"However, decorative images, images smaller than 50 x 50 pixels, excessively large images, and images categorized as pornographic in nature, gory, or sexually suggestive will not be sent to the auto-image caption service, nor provided to the screen reader", Microsoft said.
Microsoft Edge is becoming popular across the board, and had recently surpassed Safari to become world's second most popular desktop browser.
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