The ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) was held this past week in New York City. UIST is one of the premier conferences for human-computer interaction (HCI), especially for those of us who approach HCI from a perspective of building new systems that address unmet user needs.
Three papers were presented that explicitly dealt with accessibility, and I thought I’d give a quick summary of each and provide a link so you could check them out for yourselves.
VizWiz: Nearly Real-Time Answers to Visual Questions
University of Rochester, MIT CSAIL, University of Washington, University of Maryland, and University of Central Florida
VizWiz is an accessible iPhone application that lets blind people take a picture, speak a question, and get answers from the crowd in nearly real-time. VizWiz was deployed to a number of existing blind iPhone users, and used to get a sense of the visual questions that blind people might want answered regardless of what current automatic technology can do. The paper describes strategies for getting answers back from Mechanical Turk quickly and cheaply (less than 30 seconds, and for a few cents), and an extension of VizWiz called LocateIt that helps users locate a specific object among many that might be tactually indistinguishable. (full disclosure: I was the first author of this paper!)
