Visual challenges in the everyday lives of blind people

Abstract

The challenges faced by blind people in their everyday lives are not well understood. In this paper, we report on the findings of a large-scale study of the visual questions that blind people would like to have answered. As part of this yearlong study, 5,329 blind users asked 40,748 questions about photographs that they took from their iPhones using an application called VizWiz Social. We present a taxonomy of the types of questions asked, report on a number of features of the questions and accompanying photographs, and discuss how individuals changed how they used VizWiz Social over time. These results improve our understanding of the problems blind people face, and may help motivate new projects more accurately targeted to help blind people live more independently in their everyday lives.

Real time object scanning using a mobile phone and cloud-based visual search engine

“…Although blind people often have work-arounds for those small problems or can seek help from sighted persons, collectively those small problems can lead to decreased independence and less efficiency, sometimes even big frustrations. Prior study shows that identification is the most common visual challenge for which blind people seek help from access technology (41% of four categories of questions) [4].…”

“…Despite this, most current camera interfaces are only marginally accessible, which leads to poor-quality photos that are blurry, tilted or improperly framed. For instance, more than 17% of the questions sent to VizWiz could not be answered because the photo quality was too poor [4].…”

“…Workers powering systems like VizWiz [7] can suggest camera positioning guidance to help the blind user to take a better photo for the next run, but it can take several runs (and several minutes) to recognize an object, resulting a much longer time to complete individual object identification task than desired [4]. Services powered by computer vision usually lack of this feature in large part due to the difficulty in constructing automatic technologies that can do this well.…”

An approach to vision-based localisation with binary features for partially sighted people

“…Assistive technology [13,30] helps people with different disabilities to overcome their daily-life problems [7]. In the literature, there are many attempts to support blind or visually impaired people using for this purpose: social applications [7], text readers [10], Global Positioning System (GPS) [41], radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags [15,27], radio beacons [37], QR codes [14], visual markers [20,33], LED markers [26], ultra-wideband (UWB) technology [22], infrared (IR) cameras [18], or ultrasonic sensors [33].…”

Integrating Sensors in a Mobile Application Authoring Environment

“…For instance, having done away with the physical keyboard, soft buttons, icons and keyboards on touch screen devices often need to be accompanied by appropriate feedback using visual, auditory or tactile cues in order to enhance user performance and experience (Brewster et al 2007). But despite significant progress in accessible technology, non-visual interaction with touch screen technology remains problematic (Brady et al 2013). More thorough studies are thus still needed in order to investigate the effectiveness of using multimodal displays to improve interaction with this kind of technology.…”