[real-eyes] Re: interesting article
- From: Tim Sears <tufftimsears@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: real-eyes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 17:53:11 -0700 (PDT)
that is cool chip. real cool.
--- Chip Bloch <wbloch@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I received this article on another list that I
> belong to. I hope some of you will find it as
> interesting as I did.
> Chip
>
> 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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