Instagram Launches Stories for Close Friends and New Accessibility Tools

The week would not be complete without another batch of news presented by the largest social network of photos and videos in the world, right? So let's take a look at the newest cards that the Instagram Have up your sleeves to show us.

Stories for close friends

Sometimes you want to publish a Story more scruffy or, say, said little, but remember that she may not fall well in the eyes of her family, college friends, or bosses. Young people have already created a solution for this with so-called dix closed accounts, detached from their main profiles, where only close friends are accepted and the freedom of total content. Now Instagram itself is introducing one more solution to the problem.

The resource Close Friends allow you to post Stories visible only to your closest friends or anyone you feel comfortable sharing that most particular content. The feature button appears next to the option to post your photo or video to all your followers; When first used, you choose from the list of followers who enters the selection of closest contacts (this list can be edited later in the side menu of your profile).

Contacts who view your Story Only for close friends will see a green indicator on it, indicating that not everyone can see that content though, Instagram will not notify you if you are added or removed from someone's close friends list.

The feature is already being released for Instagram on iOS and Android.

Accessibility

The network is also adding two new features that will help visually impaired people more fully enjoy the content posted by their friends.

The first of these is an artificial intelligence tool that uses optical recognition technologies to detect elements in a photo or video and generate an auditory description for those users; the feature works on Feed, the Explore tab, and individual people's profiles.

We are proud to improve Instagram for visually impaired people. Starting today, we will automatically add alt text for photos on Feed, Explore tab, and profiles so that people who use screen readers can hear what's in the photo.

We are also adding a new field for alternative subtitles, so people will add more complete descriptions to those who use screen readers. These are the first steps to building a more affordable Instagram.

In addition, users will now have the option of adding alternate captions to their photos, where a fuller description of what the image contains can be written; this text is available only to people using screen readers.

In the same way as Close Friends, accessibility enhancements are already being released for Instagram on iOS and Android.


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