Improving accessibility of the web with a computer game

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. Author Keywords Distributed knowledge acquisition, Accessibility, Webbased games. ACM Classification Keywords H5.3 [HC...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Luis von Ahn, Shiry Ginosar, Mihir Kedia, Ruoran Liu, Manuel Blum
• Keywords: CHI 2006, Human Computer Interaction, Major Accessibility Issue, Proper Explanatory Text, Web Accessibility