A new feature named automatic alternative text -- or automatic alt text -- will generate more detailed descriptions of photos for users who are unable to perceive them with their eyes.

People using screen readers on iOS devices will now hear a list of items a photo may contain as they swipe past photos on Facebook.

The tool was spearheaded by Facebook’s in-house Accessibility team, which is tasked with making technology more accessible to more people.

Previously, people using screen readers would only hear the name of the person who shared the photo, followed by the term “photo” when they came upon an image in News Feed. To offering richer descriptions of photos, Facebook is employing new object recognition technology, which is based on a neural network that has billions of parameters and is trained with millions of examples.

No niche market, Facebook estimates that there are more than 246 million people with severe visual impairments, 39 million of whom are technically blind.

Continuing to grow its global community is in everyone’s best interest, according to the social giant.

“When everyone is connected, we all benefit,” Facebook engineers Shaomei Wu, Hermes Pique, and Jeffrey Wieland note in a co-authored blog post.