Carnegie Mellon University researchers have come up with a method that will automatically identify memes and will apply pre-written templates to add descriptive text making them intelligible via existing assistive technologies.
The six researchers came up with a system to classify and translate memes with up to 92 per cent accuracy. Visually impaired people generally use screen readers and built-in accessibility features to help them navigate around the internet.
According to the study, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter allow users to add alternative texts to their images but most users are not aware of the feature and simply do not use it. This has resulted in just 0.1 per cent of images being accessible for visually impaired people. Cole Gleason, a Ph.D. student at CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute said that basic computer vision techniques make it possible to describe the images underlying each meme.