Researchers Are Making Memes Accessible to the Blind
If you’re visually impaired, most internet memes are inaccessible. That needs to change.
For the 1 million Americans who are legally blind, an increasingly large part of the internet is cut off to them.
Scroll through Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok and you’ll find them littered with memes, coded images, and in-jokes utilizing pop culture references. Now imagine you’re blind. How would you see and understand them?
That’s a challenge that researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are trying to tackle. In a recent paper titled “Making Memes Accessible,” the group trained a system to classify and parse memes with up to 92% accuracy, making it possible for visually impaired users to share the joke, too.
It’s an unenviable task. “Memes are often in-jokes that are supposed to exclude outsiders,” says Scott Wark, a meme researcher at the University of Warwick. “They’re inaccessible by design.”
Many visually impaired people use screen readers and built-in accessibility tools within operating systems to help navigate the screens sighted people have no problem with. Such screen readers rely, in the case of images, on alt-text, or written descriptions of what an image depicts. The use of alt-text is…
