Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
18 results found tagged image description.
-
Access to Interpretation: How Formal Cues Ground Interpretive Alt Text for Paintings
This CHI 2026 Extended Abstract examines a gap between mainstream alt text conventions and the interpretive work that paintings are designed to evoke. The authors argue that dominant guidance for alt text foregrounds brevity, objectivity, and functio…
-
Beyond Descriptions: A Generative Scene2Audio Framework for Blind and Low-Vision Users to Experience Vista Landscapes
Scene description apps (Seeing AI, Be My AI, Envision) do a reasonable job of telling blind and low-vision (BLV) users what is in front of them, but they are built for utility - 'there is a chair'. They fail at the aesthetic, leisure, emotional exper…
-
SceneScout: Towards AI-Driven Access to Street Level Imagery for Blind Users
Jain, Findlater and Gleason present SceneScout, a prototype web interface that uses a multimodal large language model (GPT-4o) to make street level imagery — the panoramic pedestrian-height photography behind Apple Maps Look Around and Google Street …
-
WanderGuide: Indoor Map-less Robotic Guide for Exploration by Blind People
Kuribayashi and colleagues design WanderGuide, a suitcase-shaped robotic guide that supports blind people in recreational, open-ended exploration of indoor environments — wandering, browsing, window-shopping — rather than getting from A to B. The tea…
-
Eyes on the Palm: Investigating a Ring-Shaped Camera for Seamless Accessible Tactile Exploration
Tsutsui and colleagues ask how the form factor of a camera-based assistive device shapes the way blind and low-vision (BLV) users coordinate their hands during tactile exploration of real museum exhibits. Smartphone apps such as Seeing AI and Be My A…
-
Interviewing Blind Photographers: Design Insights for a Smartphone Application
This short paper reports on interviews with 11 people with limited to no vision who take digital photographs independently, investigating how they take, store, organize, and share their photos. While prior research had addressed camera aiming assista…
-
"With most of it being pictures now, I rarely use it": Understanding Twitter's Evolving Accessibility to Blind Users
This multi-method study examines how blind people use Twitter and the accessibility barriers they face as the platform shifts from text-based to increasingly image-heavy content. The researchers combined an online survey of 132 blind Twitter users, l…
-
RegionSpeak: Quick Comprehensive Spatial Descriptions of Complex Images for Blind Users
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 existin…
-
Does It Look Beautiful? Communicating Aesthetic Information about Artwork to the Visually Impaired
This paper explores how aesthetic information about visual art is communicated to people who are visually impaired, based on observational data from a study where blind individuals and sighted companions explored an art gallery together on the Univer…
-
Guiding Novice Web Workers in Making Image Descriptions Using Templates
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 D…