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How to enable VoiceOver Recognition Feature on iOS 14

There is a new VoiceOver Recognition feature for images in iOS 14 and it’s accurate in describing what’s in a picture for blind and visually impaired users.

The feature is worth trying out as it demonstrates Apple’s advancements in machine learning when it comes to examining the details in a photo. The handling of descriptions is on your device as you need to download an Image Descriptions file to your iPhone or iPad.

“Using on-device intelligence, your iPhone will automatically improve the accessibility of apps, images, and text,” describes Apple’s VoiceOver Recognition setting. For Image Descriptions, “Your iPhone will speak descriptions of images in apps and on the web.” read more

Engineering Students Design Scanner to Recreate Images from Braille

Engineering students at the University of St. Thomas are working to help almost 90,000 blind and visually impaired people in Minnesota.

Students have spent the last three years writing software and designing a machine that can help recreate images from braille textbooks.

Experts say it can cost up to $25,000 to convert an elementary school textbook to braille.

Converting the diagrams for those textbooks is much more difficult.

3-D pictures, called tactile graphics, are often handmade. There are 40,000 of them stored at State Services for the Blind (SSB) of Minnesota in St. Paul. read more

New Chrome Feature Describes Images On Websites for Blind and Partially Sighted Users

Google has added a new feature to Chrome that can identify the objects in an image, and describe them for blind or partially sighted users.

The new tool uses the same tech as Google Lens and Google Photos to analyze pictures and generates a description that can be read aloud by a screen reader, or shown as characters on a braille display.

Chrome’s new feature, called Image Descriptions, will attempt to identify the contents of the picture and say ‘Appears to be…’ followed by its best guess. For example, it might say ‘Appears to be a dog’, letting you know that the site probably contains a picture of a dog, but that the description was AI-generated and may not be entirely accurate. read more

Google Chrome Can Now Help Screen Readers Recognize Images

Google has rolled out a new accessibility feature to the Canary Channel of Chrome in a bid to make screen readers more useful where images are concerned, according to a social media post from the company. The feature allows images that haven’t been marked with a description or other attributes such as ‘alt text’ to be described to users anyway.

Users effectively enable the new feature by giving the browser permission to send images that are being read by the screen reader to Google for analysis. Once the image analysis is complete, the description is sent back to the user’s screen reader to be read out in line with other text in exactly the same way images would normally be included. read more

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