Paper Reading # 9 - VizWiz: Nearly Real-time Answers to Visual Questions

Reference
Jeffrey P. Bigham, Chandrika Jayant, Hanjie Ji, Greg Little, Andrew Miller.
UIST'10 Octobe 3-6, 2010, New York City, USA.

Summary

This paper describes some of the barriers that blind people face and some possible solutions for aid in every day activities. Current technology to aid blind people is error-prone and most of the time is also extremely expensive. The solution described in this paper is a mobile application that offers nearly real-time responses to any questions blind people may have. The application is called Viz Wiz and is available for the iPhone platform. In order to make VizWiz's answers to approximate real time, the quikTurkit approach aims at recruiting workers to be available as soon as the questions arrive. One of the main issues described by this paper is the lack of access to virtual information such as nutrition information written on a can.  Another problem with existing applications is that an automated response might not answers questions such as "What is the cheapest hamburger in the menu?". The answer could be limited to letting you know the prices of every single item on the menu. The emphasis on VizWiz is that human workers are generally a better support tool than automated messages because they can use intelligence on common sense issues that a software program does not have. At the beginning of this research a survey was constructed to get feedback from blind people on VizWiz.
Discussion
The approach of this application can be very handy for blind people. I personally do not have any relatives or friends with this problem, but if I imagine myself closing my eyes and asking for questions, human support would be my preference. The idea of this application being near real-time feedback is also extremely important in aiding blind people. Even though at the beginning of the paper, the authors mention that current applications are error-prone, VizWiz could also fail at any given time. No software application is perfect, but this seems to be heading in the right direction.