Helping the visually impaired enjoy memes

Memes are ubiquitous on the internet, but for the world’s 1.3bn people with some form of visual impairment they can be inaccessible. Internet memes are widely shared on social media for their comedic value and usually take the form of a captioned image or video, which can exclude those with sight loss from enjoying them.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Columbia University are hoping to change this. Teams at the American universities has developed a tool which translates visual memes into templates easier to understand for those with sight loss.

Software is used to analyse a meme and compare it to a database before deciding which translation method to apply to it. Memes are broken down into either audio information, accessible alt text which some social media companies allow users to add to images, or text which is separated from the image.