Answering Subjective and Open-ended Visual Questions from People with Vision Impairments

Abstract

Living in a primarily visual environment leads people with vision impairments to have many questions about the world around them. For instance, a person may need to know a product'slabel, if their outfit coordinates, or how a hotel lobby is laid out. A sighted companion may not always be available or the best person to ask. Thus technology'sability to connect people and facilitate question asking (Q&A) can greatly expand a person'snetwork of sighted answerers including with specialized Q&A apps for visual questions that employ Web workers. However, no research has studied the types of responses desired to visual questions, particularly open-ended and subjective questions that require more complex elaboration and are therefore more difficult for a sighted person to create instinctively. This research seeks to understand the information desired in a response to complex visual questions asked by people with vision impairments. After exploring the types of visual questions experienced in everyday interactions and the types of technologies used to seek responses, a final interview study with eight adults with vision impairments evaluated responses to a set of ten visual questions gathered from four different sources (a spouse of a blind person, an accessibility expert with low vision, a young adult with low vision, and a Web worker). Findings showed that participants desired many characteristics found in related literature (such as well-organized responses and additional novel details) but also desired characteristics not typically found in other work (such as desiring the opinions of the responder even in seemingly objective open-ended descriptions). Findings from this work are the beginning of understanding visual information needs, which is vital to ensuring technology continues to be a viable and useful resource for facilitating visual Q&A.