title: Appliance Displays: Accessibility Challenges and Proposed Solutions.
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.
authors.affiliation: The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, 2318 Fillmore St. San Francisco, CA 94115 USA.
authors.forename: Giovanni
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Fusco
authors.affiliation: The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, 2318 Fillmore St. San Francisco, CA 94115 USA.
authors.forename: Ender
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Tekin
authors.affiliation: University of Maine, Dept. Spatial Information Science & Engineering, Orono, ME 04469 USA.
authors.forename: Nicholas A
authors.initials: NA
authors.lastname: Giudice
authors.affiliation: The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, 2318 Fillmore St. San Francisco, CA 94115 USA.
authors.forename: James M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Coughlan
keywords: Access; blindness; low vision
references.citation: IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2006 Dec;14(4):492-500
references.pmid: 17190040
references.citation: ASSETS. 2014;2014:281-282
references.pmid: 25531011