VizWiz: Nearly Realtime Answers to Visual Questions
From: University of Rochesters Computer Science

VizWiz is an iPhone app that allows blind users to receive quick answers to
questions about their surroundings. VizWiz combines automatic image
processing, anonymous web workers, and members of the user's social network
in order to collect fast and accurate answers to their questions.

Abstract:
The lack of access to visual information like text labels, icons, and colors
can cause frustration and decrease independence for blind people. Current
access technology uses automatic approaches to address some problems in this
space, but the technology is error-prone, limited in scope, and quite
expensive. In this paper, we introduce VizWiz, a talking application for
mobile phones that offers a new alternative to answering visual questions in
nearly real-time - asking multiple people on the web. To support answering
questions quickly, we introduce a general approach for intelligently
recruiting human workers in advance called quikTurkit so that workers are
available when new questions arrive. A field deployment with 11 blind
participants illustrates that blind people can effectively use VizWiz to
cheaply answer questions in their everyday lives, highlighting issues that
automatic approaches will need to address to be useful. Finally, we
illustrate the potential of using VizWiz as part of the participatory design
of advanced tools by using it to build and evaluate VizWiz::LocateIt, an
interactive mobile tool that helps blind people solve general visual search
problems.

Conclusion:
We have presented VizWiz, a talking mobile application that enables blind
people to solve visual problems in nearly realtime by recruiting multiple
human workers for small amounts of money. VizWiz is directly inspired by how
blind people overcome many accessibility shortcomings today - ask a sighted
person - but our approach keeps users in control and allows questions to be
asked whenever needed. VizWiz is useful as both a tool for answering visual
questions and as a general approach for prototyping new tools before the
necessary automatic computer vision has been developed.

Read the entire paper at:
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/hci/pubs/pdfs/vizwiz.pdf

Links:
VizWiz website:
http://vizwiz.org/

VizWiz::LocateIt - Enabling Blind People to Locate Objects in Their
  Environment
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/hci/pubs/pdfs/vizwizlocateit.pdf

Jeffrey P. Bigham
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~jbigham/

Visual Challenges in the Everyday Lives of Blind People
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/hci/pubs/pdfs/chi2013-vizwiz.pdf

Smartphone cameras bring independence to blind people
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14505748

Submitted by Michael Bernstein