[accessibleimage] Image description game

Hi, This sounds very interesting! A game to add descriptions to websites.Article from New Scientist and from a blog.
Best,
Lisa
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn9177&print=true
http://joshuaink.com/blog/714/phetch


       Gamers help the blind get the picture

   * 13:37 16 May 2006
   * NewScientist.com news service
   * Paul Marks

Players are given a description and must then scour the web for the correct picture

Gamers now have the perfect excuse to sit in front of their computers all day – they can perform a public service.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have designed an online game that aims to harness players’ brainpower to help make websites more accessible to blind people.

Visually impaired people often use text-to-speech converters called screen readers to listen to the content of web pages spoken by a synthesised voice. However, the pictures on most websites remain inaccessible because very few have detailed captions to accurately describe them.

The online game "Phetch", which will be made available at http://www.peekaboom.org/phetch/, is designed to encourage other web users to generate these missing captions. Played in groups of three to five people, it randomly assigns the role of "describer" to one player; the rest become "seekers".


         Seek and find

The game then serves up a randomly chosen website image to the describer, who has to write a pithy short paragraph about it. The words are then sent to the seekers, who use search engines to hunt down the correct picture on the web. The first seeker to find the image becomes the describer in the next round.

If the describer’s description is good enough to lead the seekers to the picture, it is stored as a caption for that image. If not, the attempt is discarded.

"We hope to collect captions for every image on the web," says Shiry Ginosar, a member of the Phetch team. In tests, 130 players generated 1400 captions over the course of a week. At this rate, she says, just 5000 people could annotate all the pictures indexed by Google Images in just 10 months.


         Web designers

But Ginosar admits getting web designers the world over to use the better captions may be tricky. "We are just concerned about gathering caption data right now," she says.

Julie Howell from the UK's Royal National Institute for the Blind says the game addresses a pressing issue. "The web is a great resource but as it becomes more picture-led and graphical it should not become less accessible for the blind," she told *New Scientist*. "It's true that many pictures are simply uncaptioned or just have a filename."

The CMU team previously developed another game "Peekaboom" to help improve image recognition algorithms. This game involves two players: the first must reveal key parts of an image to the second person, who must try to guess what is being revealed. The theory is that players will reveal the most important parts of an image first. This could help computers better identify unfamiliar images by focusing


Blog

This is a neat idea:

   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.


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