Gamers Help the Blind Get the Picture
From: New Scientist - 05/16/2006
By: Paul Marks

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have devised an online game whose aim
is to find ways to make Web sites more accessible to blind people, who are
often unable to learn the contents of images placed online. The game,
"Phetch," seeks to encourage Web users to generate better captions for online
images. Playable online at peekaboom.org/phetch/ by groups of three to five
people, the game assigns the role of "describer" to one person while the rest
become "seekers." The describer is shown a randomly chosen Web-site image and
has to write a short paragraph to describe it, and then the seekers use
search engines to try to find the right image. "We hope to collect captains
for every image on the Web", said Phetch team member Shiry Ginosar, although
she concedes that it may be difficult to get Web designers around the world
to use the better captions. CMU researchers previously had developed a game
called "Peekaboom" designed to improve image recognition algorithms by having
one player try to guess an image using only the clues given by another user.
The game aids computers identify images because players will focus on the
most important part of images first when describing them. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn9177
http://www.greatnewsnetwork.org/index.php/news/article/gamers_help_the_blind_get_the_picture/

Phetch - Peekaboom
http://www.peekaboom.org/
http://joshuaink.com/blog/714/phetch

On transmogrifying labor
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=3053

Peekaboom - Human-Powered Riya?
http://mashable.com/2005/11/17/peekaboom-human-powered-riya/