VizWiz

TLDR

Blind people lack access to visual cues such as text, icons, and colors, which hampers independence, and existing assistive technologies are error‑prone, limited in scope, and costly. The authors present VizWiz, a mobile talking app that lets blind users ask visual questions to a crowd in near real‑time, and demonstrate its use in participatory design of tools like VizWiz::LocateIt. VizWiz employs a pre‑recruitment strategy called quikTurkit to keep human workers ready for incoming queries, enabling rapid responses via a mobile interface that routes user questions to the crowd. Field deployment with 11 blind participants showed that VizWiz can cheaply and effectively answer everyday visual questions, revealing limitations of current automatic methods.

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.