New tool to make Internet memes convenient for visually impaired people

New Delhi, Dec 02 (ANI): In a new study, researchers have developed a tool that will enable visually impaired people who find it difficult to understand memes, to enjoy them. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a tool to automatically identify memes and apply prewritten templates to add descriptive alt text, making them intelligible via existing assistive technologies. Memes largely live within social media platforms that have barriers to adding alt text. Twitter, for example, allows people to add alt text to their images, but that feature isn't always easy to find. Of 9 million tweets the CMU researchers examined, one million included images and, of those, just 0.1 per cent included alt text. Gleason said basic computer vision techniques make it possible to describe the images underlying each meme, whether it be a celebrity, a crying baby, a cartoon character or a scene such as a bus upended in a sinkhole. Optical character recognition techniques are used to decip