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• The Crowd Work Accessibility Problem

  Saiganesh Swaminathan, Kotaro Hara, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2017 · Proceedings of the 14th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper examines a largely overlooked accessibility problem: the inaccessibility of crowdsourcing tasks themselves. While crowd work platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) offer potential employment benefits for people with disabilities — flexible scheduling, remote…

  web accessibility evaluation · crowdsourcing · employment · disability employment · WCAG compliance

• Scopist: Building a Skill Ladder into Crowd Transcription

  Jeffrey P. Bigham, Kristin Williams, Nila Banerjee, John Zimmerman · 2017 · Proceedings of the 14th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper introduces Scopist, a JavaScript application designed to teach crowd workers stenotype — a chording-based text entry method used by professional real-time captioners — while they perform audio transcription microtasks. The research addresses a fundamental problem in…

  crowdsourcing · captioning · stenography · deaf accessibility · transcription

• LuzDeploy: A Collective Action System for Installing Navigation Infrastructure for Blind People

  Cole Gleason, Dragan Ahmetovic, Carlos Toxtli, Saiph Savage, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Chieko Asakawa · 2017 · Proceedings of the 14th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This demonstration paper presents LuzDeploy, a system designed to solve a practical bottleneck in deploying indoor navigation infrastructure for blind people: the difficulty of recruiting, training, and coordinating enough personnel to install Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons…

  blindness · indoor navigation · crowdsourcing · BLE beacons · assistive technology

• A Pilot Deployment of an Online Tool for Large-Scale Virtual Auditing of Urban Accessibility

  Manaswi Saha, Kotaro Hara, Soheil Behnezhad, Anthony Li, Michael Saugstad, Hanuma Maddali, Sage Chen, Jon E. Froehlich · 2017 · Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This demonstration paper introduces Project Sidewalk, a web-based tool that enables anyone with an internet connection to remotely audit urban sidewalk accessibility by virtually walking through city streets using Google Street View. The tool addresses a significant gap in…

  crowdsourcing · urban accessibility · GIS · sidewalk accessibility · curb ramps

• Crowdsourcing the Installation and Maintenance of Indoor Navigation Infrastructure

  Cole Gleason · 2017 · Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This student research competition paper presents LuzDeploy, a system designed to solve a major barrier to the adoption of indoor navigation systems for people with visual impairments: the high cost and expertise required to install and maintain the necessary infrastructure.…

  indoor navigation · crowdsourcing · Bluetooth beacons · blindness · wayfinding

• In-context Q&A to Support Blind People Using Smartphones

  André Rodrigues, Kyle Montague, Hugo Nicolau, João Guerreiro, Tiago Guerreiro · 2017 · Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This paper addresses a pervasive but understudied problem: the daily challenges blind people face when using smartphone applications go far beyond the touchscreen gesture difficulties that most accessibility research focuses on. The researchers conducted workshops with 42 blind…

  blindness · smartphone accessibility · screen readers · crowdsourcing · human computation

• Introducing People with ASD to Crowd Work

  Kotaro Hara, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2017 · Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This paper explores whether crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) can provide viable employment opportunities for adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). With an estimated 50-75% unemployment rate among adults with ASD in the U.S., the authors investigate…

  autism spectrum disorder · crowdsourcing · employment · micro-tasks · assistive technology

• Leveraging Complementary Contributions of Different Workers for Efficient Crowdsourcing of Video Captions

  Yun Huang, Yifeng Huang, Na Xue, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2017 · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

  This paper presents BandCaption, a crowdsourcing system that combines automatic speech recognition (ASR) with input from diverse crowd workers to efficiently correct video captions. The key insight is that different groups of people — hearing-impaired users, second-language…

  captioning · crowdsourcing · video accessibility · speech recognition · deaf and hard of hearing

• Facade: Auto-generating Tactile Interfaces to Appliances

  Anhong Guo, Jeeeun Kim, Xiang "Anthony" Chen, Tom Yeh, Scott E. Hudson, Jennifer Mankoff, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2017 · Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017)

  This paper introduces Facade, a crowdsourced fabrication pipeline that enables blind people to independently make flat-panel appliance interfaces accessible by generating 3D-printed tactile button overlays. The problem addressed is that modern appliances have shifted from…

  3D printing · tactile interface · blind users · crowdsourcing · fabrication

• Scribe: Deep Integration of Human and Machine Intelligence to Caption Speech in Real Time

  Walter S. Lasecki, Christopher D. Miller, Iftekhar Naim, Raja Kushalnagar, Adam Sadilek, Daniel Gildea, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2017 · Communications of the ACM

  Scribe is a system that provides on-demand, real-time captioning of live speech for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people by combining groups of non-expert human captionists with machine intelligence. The system addresses a critical accessibility gap: professional CART…

  real-time captioning · deaf and hard of hearing · crowdsourcing · human computation · speech recognition

• WearMail: On-the-Go Access to Information in Your Email with a Privacy-Preserving Human Computation Workflow

  Saiganesh Swaminathan, Raymond Fok, Fanglin Chen, Ting-Hao (Kenneth) Huang, Irene Lin, Rohan Jadvani, Walter S. Lasecki, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2017 · Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2017)

  WearMail is a conversational system that extracts specific information from a user's email via voice queries on wearable devices (such as smartwatches), using a novel privacy-preserving human computation workflow. The system addresses the challenge that email functions as…

  crowdsourcing · human computation · privacy · wearable technology · information extraction

• The Effects of Automatic Speech Recognition Quality on Human Transcription Latency

  Yashesh Gaur, Walter S. Lasecki, Florian Metze, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2016 · Proceedings of the 13th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Michigan empirically investigates when automatic speech recognition (ASR) output helps or hinders human transcriptionists producing captions for deaf and hard of hearing people. Manual transcription remains…

  speech recognition · captioning · deaf and hard of hearing · crowdsourcing · human computation

• VizLens: A Robust and Interactive Screen Reader for Interfaces in the Real World

  Anhong Guo, Xiang "Anthony" Chen, Haoran Qi, Samuel White, Suman Ghosh, Chieko Asakawa, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2016 · Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2016)

  This paper introduces VizLens, a system that functions as a screen reader for physical interfaces in the real world, enabling blind people to independently use inaccessible appliances like microwaves, thermostats, kiosks, and checkout terminals. VizLens deeply integrates…

  visual accessibility · computer vision · crowdsourcing · blind users · physical interfaces

• WearWrite: Crowd-Assisted Writing from Smartwatches

  Michael Nebeling, Alexandra To, Anhong Guo, Adrian A. de Freitas, Jaime Teevan, Steven P. Dow, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2016 · Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2016)

  WearWrite is a system that enables users to write documents from their smartwatches by leveraging crowd workers to translate ideas into text. The system addresses the fundamental limitation that smartwatches have severely constrained input/output — touch-based text input is…

  crowdsourcing · wearable technology · human computation · collaborative writing · mobile accessibility

• Improving Public Transit Accessibility for Blind Riders by Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmark Locations with Google Street View: An Extended Analysis

  Kotaro Hara, Shiri Azenkot, Megan Campbell, Cynthia L. Bennett, Vicki Le, Sean Pannella, Robert Moore, Kelly Minckler, Rochelle H. Ng, Jon E. Froehlich · 2015 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper tackles a fundamental challenge in public transit accessibility: helping blind and low-vision riders locate bus stops, which often lack nonvisual markers or consistent landmark placement. The researchers developed Bus Stop CSI (Crowdsourcing Streetview Inspections), a…

  public transit · blind and low vision · crowdsourcing · wayfinding · landmarks

• CAN: Composable Accessibility Infrastructure via Data-Driven Crowdsourcing

  Yun Huang, Brian Dobreski, Bijay Bhaskar Deo, Jiahang Xin, Natã Miccael Barbosa, Yang Wang, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2015 · Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents CAN (Composable Accessibility Infrastructure), a crowdsourcing platform that collects web accessibility issues from real websites and their open-source fixes, dynamically composes solutions on-the-fly, and delivers the crowdsourced content as both immediate…

  crowdsourcing · web accessibility · accessibility education · automated testing · screen readers

• Measuring Text Simplification with the Crowd

  Walter S. Lasecki, Luz Rello, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2015 · Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper investigates whether non-expert crowd workers can reliably evaluate the simplicity of English text, addressing a key gap in text simplification research. Text simplification — reducing the lexical and syntactic complexity of sentences while preserving meaning — is…

  text simplification · crowdsourcing · natural language processing · readability · cognitive accessibility

• SmartWrap: Seeing Datasets with the Crowd's Eyes

  Steven Gardiner, Anthony Tomasic, John Zimmerman · 2015 · Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2015)

  This paper presents SmartWrap, a Firefox extension that enables sighted web users — including nonprogrammers — to create reusable "wrappers" that extract the semantic structure of visually-presented datasets on web pages, making them navigable by screen readers. The core problem…

  crowdsourcing · screen readers · web accessibility · semantic annotation · web scraping

• Zebra Crossing Spotter: Automatic Population of Spatial Databases for Increased Safety of Blind Travelers

  Dragan Ahmetovic, Roberto Manduchi, James M. Coughlan, Sergio Mascetti · 2015 · ASSETS '15: Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility

  This paper presents a computer vision system that automatically detects zebra crosswalks by mining satellite imagery and Google Street View, with the goal of augmenting geographic information systems (GIS) to help blind travelers plan safer routes. Knowing crosswalk locations is…

  visual impairment · navigation · computer vision · pedestrian crossings · wayfinding

• The Effects of Automatic Speech Recognition Quality on Human Transcription Latency

  Yashesh Gaur · 2015 · ASSETS '15: Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility

  This paper investigates a practical question for accessibility: when does providing automatic speech recognition (ASR) output help human captionists work faster, and when does it slow them down? Converting speech to text is fundamental for making audio content accessible to deaf…

  deaf · hard of hearing · automatic speech recognition · ASR · captioning

• EnTable: Rewriting Web Data Sets as Accessible Tables

  Steven Gardiner, Anthony Tomasic, John Zimmerman · 2015 · ASSETS '15: Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility

  This demonstration paper presents EnTable, a crowdsourcing system that transforms visually complex web data presentations into accessible HTML tables. The problem it addresses is fundamental: modern web designers communicate semantic information through sophisticated CSS and…

  web accessibility · crowdsourcing · screen readers · data tables · transcoding

• Guiding Novice Web Workers in Making Image Descriptions Using Templates

  Valerie S. Morash, Yue-Ting Siu, Joshua A. Miele, Lucia Hasty, Steven Landau · 2015 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS)

  This study compares two approaches for using non-expert crowdworkers to create accessible descriptions of STEM images (charts, graphs, diagrams) for people who are blind or have print-reading disabilities. The researchers tested Free-Response Image Description (FRID), where…

  image description · alt text · crowdsourcing · human computation · STEM accessibility

• Gauging Receptiveness to Social Microvolunteering

  Erin Brady, Meredith Ringel Morris, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2015 · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

  This paper introduces the concept of social microvolunteering — a hybrid of friendsourcing and microvolunteering where volunteers install an application that posts microtasks to their social media feeds, enabling their friends to contribute to causes they care about. The…

  crowdsourcing · microvolunteering · friendsourcing · social media · visual impairment

• ApplianceReader: A Wearable, Crowdsourced, Vision-based System to Make Appliances Accessible

  Anhong Guo, Xiang "Anthony" Chen, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2015 · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts

  This work-in-progress paper presents ApplianceReader, a wearable system that combines a point-of-view camera (Google Glass) with crowdsourcing and computer vision to make everyday appliance control panels accessible to people with visual impairments. The system addresses a…

  appliance accessibility · crowdsourcing · computer vision · wearable technology · blindness

• RegionSpeak: Quick Comprehensive Spatial Descriptions of Complex Images for Blind Users

  Yu Zhong, Walter S. Lasecki, Erin Brady, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2015 · Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2015)

  This paper introduces RegionSpeak, a mobile application that helps blind users get comprehensive spatial descriptions of complex visual scenes by combining image stitching with parallelized crowdsourced labeling. The authors identify a gap in existing visual question-answering…

  visual accessibility · crowdsourcing · image description · spatial awareness · blind users