Improving Web Accessibility Using A Computer Game Project

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 a new game, 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, this game can output a correct annotation for it. The collected data can be applied towards significantly improving Web accessibility. In addition to improving accessibility, this 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. The Web is not built for the blind. Only a small fraction of major corporate websites are fully accessible to the disabled, let alone those of smaller organizations or individuals [5]. However, millions of blind people surf the Web every day, and Internet use by those with disabilities grows at twice the rate of the non-disabled .One of the major accessibility problems is the lack of descriptive captions for images. Visually impaired individuals commonly surf the Web using “screen readers” .We set our goal to assign proper descriptions to arbitrary images. A “proper” description is correct if it makes sense with respect to the image, and sufficient if it gives enough information about its contents. Rather than designing a computer vision algorithm that generates natural language descriptions for arbitrary images (a feat still far from attainable), we opt for harnessing humans. It is common knowledge that humans have little difficulty in describing the contents of images, although typically they do not find this task particularly engaging. On the other hand, many people would spend a considerable amount of time involved in an activity they consider “fun.” Thus, like the ESP Game we achieve our goal by working around the problem, and creating a fun game that produces the data we aim to collect .We therefore introduce a game which, as a side effect, generates explanatory sentences for randomly chosen images.