[ospfer]

Last July, I lead a project in support of a federal agency to analyze current business processes and identify weaknesses in the agency Section 508 office. My work focused primarily on externally accessible internet sites and one of the most common 508 violations that we encountered was the lack of ALT-text on images. This agency utilized a number of automated scanning tools and processes, but lacked any ability to efficiently remediate these errors. While we never talked more than from a conceptual standpoint, a coworker and I discussed something along the lines of what Facebook has accomplished here through the use of Google's Neural Networks. Very cool to see this advancement come to life.

[dr_zoidberg]

This kind of systems/algorithims also allows to asign a certain semantic component to images (with a grain of salt, of course), which might enable further developments that weren't considered posible yet.

Sadly, it also brings another complete set of cases to the oh-so-anoying "but Facebook/Google/Twitter/Amazon does it!" clichés that we'll now have to deal with...