A code commit that I spotted today talks about an interesting accessibility feature. I am not an expert in this area and you won’t see many articles about accessibility on Chrome Story.

However, this one is bit interesting because it involves image processing and Artificial Intelligence (AI). It doesn’t say “AI”, but instead uses the term ‘computer generated”. Well, a computer looking at an image and telling us what it sees is definitely AI in my book.

The Flag

Update: this flag is now available in Canary.

This flag is not available on the browser yet. However, we might see it in the Canary version of Chrome in coming days. I got the flag description from the code here.

Accessibility Image Descriptions: “Enables screen reader users to request computer-generated descriptions of unlabeled images using the page context menu”

Based on the above description, the feature will work like this; users with screen readers can right-click and get image descriptions even when the image does not have any descriptions.

AI generating image descriptions is not a new thing. Social networks like Facebook and Pinterest have been doing it for a while now. However, using this for accessibility as a built-in browser feature seems to be something new.

What do you think ?

PS: I am pretty sure this is new, but there is a possibility that this feature is already available in some other form. If you know anything more about this topic, help me by dropping a comment below.