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VizWiz: nearly real-time answers to visual questions

Published: 26 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Visual information pervades our environment. Vision is used to decide everything from what we want to eat at a restaurant and which bus route to take to whether our clothes match and how long until the milk expires. Individually, the inability to interpret such visual information is a nuisance for blind people who often have effective, if inefficient, work-arounds to overcome them. Collectively, however, they can make blind people less independent. Specialized technology addresses some problems in this space, but automatic approaches cannot yet answer the vast majority of visual questions that blind people may have. VizWiz addresses this shortcoming by using the Internet connections and cameras on existing smartphones to connect blind people and their questions to remote paid workers' answers. VizWiz is designed to have low latency and low cost, making it both competitive with expensive automatic solutions and much more versatile.

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References

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Chacha. http://www.chacha.com/, 2010.
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Matthews et al. Scribe4Me: Evaluating a Mobile Sound Transcription Tool for the Deaf. In UbiComp 2006.
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Power et al. Deaf People Communicating via SMS, TTY, Relay Service, Fax, and Computers in Australia. In Jnl. of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, Volume 12, Issue 1, 2006.
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Quikturkit, 2010. http://quikturkit.googlecode.com.
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Takagi et al. Social accessibility: achieving accessibility through collaborative metadata authoring. In ASSETS 2008.
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  • (2024)Netizen A11y: Engaging Internet Users in Making Visual Media AccessibleCompanion Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3640544.3645247(159-162)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Segment then Match: Find the Carrier before Reasoning in Scene-Text VQAICASSP 2024 - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)10.1109/ICASSP48485.2024.10445873(8130-8134)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
  • (2023)“Dump it, Destroy it, Send it to Data Heaven”: Blind People’s Expectations for Visual Privacy in Visual Assistance TechnologiesProceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference10.1145/3587281.3587296(134-147)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      W4A '10: Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)
      April 2010
      223 pages
      ISBN:9781450300452
      DOI:10.1145/1805986
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 26 April 2010

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      Author Tags

      1. blind users
      2. collaborative accessibility

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      W4A '10 Paper Acceptance Rate 10 of 32 submissions, 31%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 171 of 371 submissions, 46%

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      Cited By

      View all
      • (2024)Netizen A11y: Engaging Internet Users in Making Visual Media AccessibleCompanion Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3640544.3645247(159-162)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2024
      • (2024)Segment then Match: Find the Carrier before Reasoning in Scene-Text VQAICASSP 2024 - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)10.1109/ICASSP48485.2024.10445873(8130-8134)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
      • (2023)“Dump it, Destroy it, Send it to Data Heaven”: Blind People’s Expectations for Visual Privacy in Visual Assistance TechnologiesProceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference10.1145/3587281.3587296(134-147)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
      • (2023)TacNote: Tactile and Audio Note-Taking for Non-Visual AccessProceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3586183.3606784(1-14)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2023
      • (2023)"I Want to Figure Things Out": Supporting Exploration in Navigation for People with Visual ImpairmentsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35794967:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
      • (2023)SBVQA 2.0: Robust End-to-End Speech-Based Visual Question Answering for Open-Ended QuestionsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.333953711(140967-140980)Online publication date: 2023
      • (2022)Hands-On: Using Gestures to Control Descriptions of a Virtual Environment for People with Visual ImpairmentsAdjunct Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3526114.3558669(1-4)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2022
      • (2022)Privacy Concerns for Visual Assistance TechnologiesACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/351738415:2(1-43)Online publication date: 19-May-2022
      • (2022)EKTVQA: Generalized Use of External Knowledge to Empower Scene Text in Text-VQAIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2022.318647110(72092-72106)Online publication date: 2022
      • (2022)How See the Colorful Scenery?: The Color-Centered Descriptive Text Generation for the Visually Impaired in JapanHCI International 2022 Posters10.1007/978-3-031-06417-3_75(562-569)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2022
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