Improving accessibility of the web with a computer game

ABSTRACT

Images on the Web present a major accessibility issue for the visually impaired, mainly because the majority of them do not have proper captions. This paper addresses the problem of attaching proper explanatory text descriptions to arbitrary images on the Web. To this end, we introduce Phetch, an enjoyable computer game that collects explanatory descriptions of images. People play the game because it is fun, and as a side effect of game play we collect valuable information. Given any image from the World Wide Web, Phetch can output a correct annotation for it. The collected data can be applied towards significantly improving Web accessibility. In addition to improving accessibility, Phetch is an example of a new class of games that provide entertainment in exchange for human processing power. In essence, we solve a typical computer vision problem with HCI tools alone.

REFERENCES

• 1: Luis von Ahn , Laura Dabbish, Labeling images with a computer game, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.319-326, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985733]
• 2: Eric Brill , Susan Dumais , Michele Banko, An analysis of the AskMSR question-answering system, Proceedings of the ACL-02 conference on Empirical methods in natural language processing, p.257-264, July 06, 2002 [doi>10.3115/1118693.1118726]
• 3: National Organization on Disability Website. http://www.nod.org/
• 4: Stork, D. G. The Open Mind Initiative. IEEE Intelligent Systems & Their Applications, 14-3, 1999, pages 19--20.
• 5: Watchfire Corporation Website. http://watchfire.com.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces

Keywords:
accessibility, distributed knowledge acquisition, web-based games