by Joe Lonergan
Recently Microsoft had their annual Ability summit, and they released a new accessibility assistant.
This new Accessibility Assistant will help users of Microsoft 365 Office software make content more accessible. The Accessibility Assistant will instruct users in real time how to make changes when creating documents and content, so it becomes more accessible. A new person-shaped icon will be used to flag the location of accessibility issues across your work, such as low contrast between text and background.
The Accessibility Assistant will be rolling out in the coming weeks and months and will eventually be replacing the existing Accessibility Checker which retrospectively checks for issues on request.
Automatically generated Alt text for images on LinkedIn
Also announced from Microsoft, is that the popular social network for business people LinkedIn is introducing automatically generated alt text descriptions and captioning using Azure Cognitive Services, Microsoft’s collection of cloud-based AI features for developers. This is going to be a form of automated generated captions and image descriptions, so it’s AI-based and is not checked by a real person, but it is much better than having no alt text.
With Microsoft purchasing Some of Chat GPT’s services we will see them improve things significantly in this area going forward. We really look forward to the potential of Microsoft’s version of Chat GPT 4 which will accurately convert images into text.