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Appliance Displays: Accessibility Challenges and Proposed Solutions

Published: 26 October 2015 Publication History

Abstract

People who are blind or visually impaired face difficulties using a growing array of everyday appliances because they are equipped with inaccessible electronic displays. We report developments on our --Display Reader-- smartphone app, which uses computer vision to help a user acquire a usable image of a display and have the contents read aloud, to address this problem. Drawing on feedback from past and new studies with visually impaired volunteer participants, as well as from blind accessibility experts, we have improved and simplified our user interface and have also added the ability to read seven-segment digit displays. Our system works fully automatically and in real time, and we compare it with general-purpose assistive apps such as Be My Eyes, which recruit remote sighted assistants (RSAs) to answer questions about video captured by the user. Our discussions and preliminary experiment highlight the advantages and disadvantages of fully automatic approaches compared with RSAs, and suggest possible hybrid approaches to investigate in the future.

References

[1]
Brady, E., Morris, M.R., Zhong, Y., White, S.C. & Bigham, J.P. "Visual Challenges in the Everyday Lives of Blind People." Proc. ACM SIGCHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013), Paris, France, 2013.
[2]
Fusco, G., Tekin, E., Ladner, R. E., & Coughlan, J. M. (2014, October). "Using computer vision to access appliance displays." In Proc. 16th Int--l Conf. on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS '14), pp. 281--282.
[3]
Guo, A., Chen, X. A., & Bigham, J. P. (2015, April). "ApplianceReader: A Wearable, Crowdsourced, Vision-based System to Make Appliances Accessible." Proc. 33rd Annual ACM Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2043--2048). ACM.
[4]
Morris, T., Blenkhorn, P., Crossey, L., Ngo, Q., Ross, M., Werner, D., Wong, C. "Clearspeech: a display reader for the visually handicapped." IEEE Trans. Neural Syst. Rehab. Eng. Dec 2006, 14(4), pp.492--500.
[5]
Rasines, I., Iriondo, P. and Díez, I. "Real-Time Display Recognition System for Visually Impaired." Int'l Conf. on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (ICCHP '12). Linz, Austria, July 2012.
[6]
Rasines, I., Iriondo, P. and Díez, I. "Real-Time Display Recognition System for Visually Impaired." Int'l Conf. on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (ICCHP '12). Linz, Austria, July 2012.

Cited By

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  • (2024)Making 3D Printer Accessible for People with Visual Impairments by Reading Scrolling Text and MenusProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3688517(1-4)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2022)"I was Confused by It; It was Confused by Me:" Exploring the Experiences of People with Visual Impairments around Mobile Service RobotsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555826:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2019)Accessibility Evaluation of Automated Vending MachinesAdvances in Design for Inclusion10.1007/978-3-030-20444-0_5(47-56)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2019
  • Show More Cited By

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  1. Appliance Displays: Accessibility Challenges and Proposed Solutions

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ASSETS '15: Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility
    October 2015
    466 pages
    ISBN:9781450334006
    DOI:10.1145/2700648
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 26 October 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. access
    2. blindness
    3. low vision

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    • Poster

    Funding Sources

    • NIH
    • National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research
    • NSF

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    ASSETS '15
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    ASSETS '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 127 submissions, 24%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

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    ASSETS '25

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    View all
    • (2024)Making 3D Printer Accessible for People with Visual Impairments by Reading Scrolling Text and MenusProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3688517(1-4)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
    • (2022)"I was Confused by It; It was Confused by Me:" Exploring the Experiences of People with Visual Impairments around Mobile Service RobotsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555826:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
    • (2019)Accessibility Evaluation of Automated Vending MachinesAdvances in Design for Inclusion10.1007/978-3-030-20444-0_5(47-56)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2019
    • (2017)“Hands On” Visual Recognition for Visually Impaired UsersACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/306005610:3(1-30)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2017

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