VizWiz: nearly real-time answers to visual questions

Visual information pervades our environment. Vision is used to de cide 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 effec tive, if inefficient, work-arounds to overcome them. Collectively, however, they can make blind people less independent. Special ized technology addresses some problems in this space, but au tomatic approaches cannot yet answer the vast majority of visual questions that blind people may have. VizWiz addresses this short coming 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. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [In...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: UIST
• Authors: Jeffrey P. Bigham, Chandrika Jayant, Hanjie Ji, Greg Little, Andrew Miller, Robert C. Miller, Robin Miller, Aubrey Tatarowicz, Brandyn White, Samuel White, Tom Yeh
• Keywords: Blind People, Keywords Blind Users, Software Engineering, UIST 2010, Visual Information