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The world's biggest social network just found a brilliant way to be more accessible to blind users.

Someone in my Facebook feed recently uploaded a ... surprising picture with the caption, "I drove past this on the way home."

In the comments, a friend wrote, "Woah!" Another person, "lol."

There are so many ways to react to a photo! Image by Theus Falcão/Flickr.

Want to know what it was a picture of? If you're like most of Facebook's 1.5 billion users, I could just send you the link so you could see for yourself. But if you're blind or visually impaired, like 285 million people worldwide, well, tough luck.

People who can't see are often stuck reading contextual clues, asking for clarification, or just flat missing out altogether on these shared Facebook experiences.

But there's some good news.

Facebook's accessibility team is working on new artificial intelligence that would scan, analyze, and describe photos to users who need it.

The Internet can be a challenging place for people who are blind or visually impaired, but it's actually come a really long way.

Amanda Martins, a student in New York who's been blind since just before her first birthday, told Upworthy, "I can do most things on the Internet."

She credits screen readers like Apple's VoiceOver that can read text aloud to her. And accessibility best practices have really evolved to help web designers and content creators when it comes to writing descriptive captions for their images, which can also be read by these programs.

But the uncharted world of user-generated content on social media is a totally different story.

Screen readers are kind of like Braille for the Internet. Photo by rolanddme/Flickr.

We share practically our entire lives on Facebook. Whether it's baby pictures, wedding photos, or the always popular "alcoholic beverage held up against a sunsetting sky." But if you can't see, you can't interact with these moments, and rarely do the captions we write for our photos accurately describe them (though Amanda said she's super appreciative when they do).

That leaves those who are blind or visually impaired missing out on the connectivity that's supposed to be at the heart of Facebook.

Facebook's new "object recognition," while it can't describe whole images, will be able to identify and describe some of their key elements to a user.

Matt King, a Facebook engineer who is also blind, walked TechCrunch through how it might work:

King eventually scrolled to a friend's post that featured text and a photo. His friend, Anne, wrote, “Ready for picture day of first grade" accompanied with a photo. Thanks to the object recognition technology Facebook is prototyping, King heard: “This image may contain, colon, one or more people. Child." Without it, all King would've known was that Anne wrote, “Ready for picture day of first grade," and that she posted a photo — but nothing about what was in the photo. For another photo, the tool told him: “This image may contain colon nature, outdoor, cloud, foliage, grass, tree."

OK, it's not exactly Hemingway, but it's better than nothing.

Talking about this intriguing development, Amanda said, "No technology is ever going to enable me to 'see' pictures. And that's fine. I just want to be able to understand what a huge percentage of my news feed is. Even if all this technology can do is tell me that someone's uncaptioned photo is 'outside, child, bus,' I'll be able to intuit that it's a photo of a kid getting on a bus for school."

Facebook's tool might describe this as "outside, children, bus." Photo by woodleywonderworks/Flickr.

King put it like this: "This might not be 100 percent yet, but even if it's just halfway there, the level of engagement that's possible, the amount of enjoyment I can get — that's like going from zero percent to at least 50 percent of what you might get. That's a huge jump."

Facebook's accessibility team has a tough job, but they've done some great work so far.

The team, led by Jeff Wieland, is designed to "improve Facebook for people with disabilities, and ensure that our products cooperate with assistive technology."

They do a lot of their work inside an "Empathy Lab," an environment that allows engineers to emulate what it might be like to use Facebook with different impairments. That's led them to make some pretty cool improvements to the platform, like better integration with VoiceOver and built-in support for people posting about depression or self-harm.

They're not perfect, though. Amanda says she's constantly encountering new Facebook features that don't work with VoiceOver, though she also says Facebook is usually pretty good about getting those issues fixed.

According to TechCrunch, Facebook hopes to release object identification by the end of the year on either their mobile or web platform.

Oh, and the picture my Facebook acquaintance put up? It was of some police trying to keep a cow from crossing the highway. But it could have just as easily been something much more memorable, like a baby's first steps or a friend proudly standing in front of her newly purchased home.

As for the fact that soon no one will have to miss out on things like that because they can't see? There's only one thing left to say:

Photo by Sean MacEntee/Flickr.

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American Cancer Society
American Cancer Society
Science

Meet the researcher shining a light on the “white lens” of medical AI in skin cancer prevention

How we can create equity for all communities?

All images provided by Adewole Adamson

It begins with more inclusive conversations at a patient level

True

Adewole Adamson, MD, of the University of Texas, Austin, aims to create more equity in health care by gathering data from more diverse populations by using artificial intelligence (AI), a type of machine learning. Dr. Adamson’s work is funded by the American Cancer Society (ACS), an organization committed to advancing health equity through research priorities, programs and services for groups who have been marginalized.

Melanoma became a particular focus for Dr. Adamson after meeting Avery Smith, who lost his wife—a Black woman—to the deadly disease.

melanoma, melanoma for dark skin Avery Smith (left) and Adamson (sidenote)

This personal encounter, coupled with multiple conversations with Black dermatology patients, drove Dr. Adamson to a concerning discovery: as advanced as AI is at detecting possible skin cancers, it is heavily biased.

To understand this bias, it helps to first know how AI works in the early detection of skin cancer, which Dr. Adamson explains in his paper for the New England Journal of Medicine (paywall). The process uses computers that rely on sets of accumulated data to learn what healthy or unhealthy skin looks like and then create an algorithm to predict diagnoses based on those data sets.

This process, known as supervised learning, could lead to huge benefits in preventive care.

After all, early detection is key to better outcomes. The problem is that the data sets don’t include enough information about darker skin tones. As Adamson put it, “everything is viewed through a ‘white lens.’”

“If you don’t teach the algorithm with a diverse set of images, then that algorithm won’t work out in the public that is diverse,” writes Adamson in a study he co-wrote with Smith (according to a story in The Atlantic). “So there’s risk, then, for people with skin of color to fall through the cracks.”

Tragically, Smith’s wife was diagnosed with melanoma too late and paid the ultimate price for it. And she was not an anomaly—though the disease is more common for White patients, Black cancer patients are far more likely to be diagnosed at later stages, causing a notable disparity in survival rates between non-Hispanics whites (90%) and non-Hispanic blacks (66%).

As a computer scientist, Smith suspected this racial bias and reached out to Adamson, hoping a Black dermatologist would have more diverse data sets. Though Adamson didn’t have what Smith was initially looking for, this realization ignited a personal mission to investigate and reduce disparities.

Now, Adamson uses the knowledge gained through his years of research to help advance the fight for health equity. To him, that means not only gaining a wider array of data sets, but also having more conversations with patients to understand how socioeconomic status impacts the level and efficiency of care.

“At the end of the day, what matters most is how we help patients at the patient level,” Adamson told Upworthy. “And how can you do that without knowing exactly what barriers they face?”

american cancer society, skin cacner treatment"What matters most is how we help patients at the patient level."https://www.kellydavidsonstudio.com/

The American Cancer Society believes everyone deserves a fair and just opportunity to prevent, find, treat, and survive cancer—regardless of how much money they make, the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, gender identity, their disability status, or where they live. Inclusive tools and resources on the Health Equity section of their website can be found here. For more information about skin cancer, visit cancer.org/skincancer.

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Pop Culture

Jimmy Fallon asked people to share their worst first dates, and some were just laughably bad

Romance doesn't always come easily, does it?

YouTube/Twitter

As the saying goes, "You have to kiss a few frogs..."

Dating has certainly evolved over the years—we’ve gone from courtship being purely a financial arrangement (not that this trend has ever truly died) to knights jousting for a lady’s favor, to casual hookups … and now, romance is primarily found through an app more than anything else.

Technology used for meeting that special someone has become so advanced that you can base your search entirely upon specific interests. Like … oddly specific interests. Think a fellow cat person would be the purrfect match? There’s an app for that. Wish to “love long and prosper” with a fellow Trekkie? There’s an app for that too.

No matter the changes, one thing remains the same—dating is awkward. It’s got all the unspoken formalities of a job interview, disguised as innocent fun. The balance between playing it too cool and too eager is hard to find even for the smoothest among us, and usually results in total embarrassment. Even if we aren’t the ones committing those embarrassing acts ourselves, we are often the reluctant witness to them.

Terrible dates might not always be fun in the moment, but they can be just as important as the good ones. They can teach us a lot about ourselves and what qualities we want in a partner. And at the very least, they can teach us to embrace social clumsiness with a sense of humor.

Jimmy Fallon recently asked his “Tonight Show” audience on Twitter to share a “funny or embarrassing first date story” for his ever popular #Hashtags segment. The best part—some of these awful first dates ended in marriage. There’s hope for us all.

Below, find 15 stories that are truly the the best of the worst. How do some of your first dates compare?

1. "After a nice dinner, she invited me to her house. On the way up, inside the elevator, I decided to push the button to stop between floors and give her a kiss... She had a phobia of closed spaces and she smacked my face as a reflex, two punches after we were kissing and laughing.” – @PanqueAlgarvio

2. “His jeans were so tight he couldn’t sit down. Stood at a bar stool the whole time.” – @onlyintheozarks

3. “Waiting 4 my date when an older couple asked me for a ride. my date came up and said sure! We drove them home & they asked us to come in. Date said “sure”. I pulled him back & asked why he wanted to hang w/strangers. He said ‘sh@t! YOU DON'T KNOW THEM!?’ We bolted!” – @natashaham75

facebook dating

Talk about a fashion faux pas.

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4. “Before the date, we had been chatting about books we liked and I talked about a great book I just read. We went on the date. I loaned her the book. She ghosted me.” – @thenextbarstool

5. “The worst first date I ever had was when my date locked his keys in the car and I had a curfew so he had to break his car window out to get me home on time. Didn’t think I’d ever see him again but we wound up married.” – @csleblan

6. “First date movie ‘Basic Instinct’ not realizing how suggestive it was. We just thought it was a mystery thriller! We left the movie discussing how each character could have actually murdered someone. We're married now.” – @Southrnbell_Amy

black people meet

There are worse first date movies tbh.

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7. “First date with my ex husband was a double date with his parents. The preview for ‘Speed Racer’ came on, and she leaned over me to say to her son, ‘You know what your dad's nickname in the bedroom is?’" – @theostoria

8. “A friend asked me on a double date as a blind date with his date's friend. I went to the bathroom and came back just in time to hear my date say to her friend, ‘why do I get the ugly one?’ I said good night to all three and headed home, leaving her w/the bill.” – @StevenTrustum

9. “He loved cheese. I was subjected to a 2 hour conversation/lecture about cheese, and why cottage cheese is not cheese!” – @Optimist_Eeyore

bumble

I'd like to see this two-hour cheese lecture.

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10. “He took me to an Asian fish market. We walked around looking at live & dead fish for a while. I don’t like seeing dead animals & I don’t eat seafood. Then we sat on a curb & he pulled out a ziplock bag of pineapple for us to share. I don’t like pineapple.” – @markayhali

11. “My cousin set up a first date for me with a family friend. During a break from dinner, Mr. Man follows me into the ladies’ room, comes up close and says in a low voice, ‘I shave my butt.’ Can’t remember what I said in response but the evening ended abruptly.” – @carli_zarzana

12. “I once took out my high school crush to a sports bar and ordered the spiciest wings there in an attempt to impress her. Not only was she not impressed. The next morning I woke up with heartburn.” –@Dmonster38

tindr conversation starters

Talk about a hot date.

GIF

13. “My date showed up with his bestie and girlfriend, and they talked through dinner about people I don’t know. Walking to the car, he gave me a wedgie because he thought he hadn’t been paying enough attention to me.” – @surrealDazey


14. “I was taking my date home and was pulled over by the police for speeding. When the cop came to my car, she jumped out and told him she had to get home. She walked home and I never heard from her again. I'm not sure who's #WorstFirstDate it was mine or hers!” – @eastriverbear

15. “After an evening of dancing with a first date, leaving the dance hall, I had to take a quick pee break. Rushing out to the parking lot, I see a lady, I grab her and swoop her around, and plant a big wet kiss on the lips. She was another guy's wife. Oops!” – @seadogskamore

date you

Only Gomez could have gotten away with it.

Giphy

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Lil Nas X responds to protesters outside his concert by ordering them pizza

Sometimes the best way to fight hate is with kindness coupled with a little bit of petty.

Wikicommons

Lil Nas X gives protesters pizza.

Lil Naz X really is a gift to this world, but that obviously depends on who you ask because for some people his existence seems to chafe some uncomfortable places. Recently people decided they just couldn't allow the singer to live his best life without him knowing that they did not approve, so they protested outside of his concert. Lil Nas X could've been pretty upset about the protest and let it ruin his show but he did the complete opposite. The "Old Town Road" singer decided to respond with an unexpected gesture of kindness by ordering the group pizza.

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Kid's outpouring of emotion meeting his baby brother for the first time has us wrecked

Love at its purest.

Photo by Hu Chen on Unsplash

Meeting a new sibling can go either way, but this big brother's reaction was the sweetest.

We've all seen our fair share of older-sibling-meets-new-baby videos, which are generally pretty darn adorable. But once in a while, one comes along that socks us square in the heart and has us desperately reaching for a tissue.

Brace yourselves, friends, because this is one video that truly requires a tissue warning.

Shared by @brianaarielle89 on TikTok, the video shows a preschooler dressed up in a dinosaur costume entering a hospital room to meet his newborn sibling for the first time. He asks, "Mommy, where is Hudson?" and is guided over to the cot where his baby brother is bundled.

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