Literature Reviews — A11y Paradise

Accessible Photo Album: Enhancing the Photo Sharing Experience for People with Visual Impairment

Susumu Harada, Daisuke Sato, Dustin W. Adams, Sri Kurniawan, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2013) — Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13)

This paper investigates how blind and partially sighted people can be supported not only in capturing photographs but in organising, recalling, and sharing them afterwards — a step that the authors argue has been largely neglected in prior blind-phot…

ReCog: Supporting Blind People in Recognizing Personal Objects

Dragan Ahmetovic, Daisuke Sato, Uran Oh, Tatsuya Ishihara, Kris Kitani, Chieko Asakawa (2020) — Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

ReCog is a smartphone application designed to help blind users recognize their own personal objects — items like specific clothing, handmade goods, medicines, or family photos that cannot be identified by general-purpose recognizers such as Seeing AI…

Helping Visually Impaired Users Properly Aim a Camera

Marynel Vázquez, Aaron Steinfeld (2012) — Proceedings of the 14th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2012)

This paper evaluates three interaction modes for helping visually impaired users aim a camera to achieve good photo composition: speech-based feedback (spoken directional words like "up", "down", "left", "right" with pitch indicating proximity), tone…

Interviewing Blind Photographers: Design Insights for a Smartphone Application

Dustin Adams, Tory Gallagher, Alexander Ambard, Sri Kurniawan (2013) — Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS)

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…

Supporting Blind Photography

Chandrika Jayant, Hanjie Ji, Samuel White, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2011) — ASSETS '11: The Proceedings of the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

This paper explores how blind and low-vision people use cameras and presents two applications designed to make photography more accessible. The research begins with a large-scale online survey of 118 blind and low-vision people that establishes the e…

EasySnap: Real-time Audio Feedback for Blind Photography

Samuel White, Hanjie Ji, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2010) — Adjunct Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2010)

This demonstration paper presents EasySnap, an iPhone application that enables blind and low-vision users to take high-quality photographs by providing real-time audio feedback as they point their camera phones. The system addresses a key barrier: bl…

Blind Photographers and VizSnap: A Long-Term Study

Dustin Adams, Sri Kurniawan, Cynthia Herrera, Veronica Kang, Natalie Friedman (2016) — Proceedings of the 18th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '16)

This paper reports on a two-month longitudinal study with 13 blind participants (ages 18-65, nine totally blind and two with some light perception, seven adventitiously and six congenitally blind) using VizSnap, a free iPhone app designed to help bli…

VisPhoto: Photography for People with Visual Impairments via Post-Production of Omnidirectional Camera Imaging

Naoki Hirabayashi, Masakazu Iwamura, Zheng Cheng, Kazunori Minatani, Koichi Kise (2023) — Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS)

This paper introduces VisPhoto, a novel photography system that fundamentally reimagines how people with visual impairments (PVI) take photographs. Rather than helping users aim a conventional camera at a target in real-time (the dominant approach in…