Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
10-2021
Abstract
The majority of online video contents remain inaccessible to people with visual impairments due to the lack of audio descriptions to depict the video scenes. Content creators have traditionally relied on professionals to author audio descriptions, but their service is costly and not readily-available. We investigate the feasibility of creating more cost-effective audio descriptions that are also of high quality by involving novices. Specifically, we designed, developed, and evaluated ViScene, a web-based collaborative audio description authoring tool that enables a sighted novice author and a reviewer either sighted or blind to interact and contribute to scene descriptions (SDs)—text that can be transformed into audio through text-to-speech. Through a mixed-design study with N = 60 participants, we assessed the quality of SDs created by sighted novices with feedback from both sighted and blind reviewers. Our results showed that with ViScene novices could produce content that is Descriptive, Objective, Referable, and Clear at a cost of i.e., US$2.81pvm to US$5.48pvm, which is 54% to 96% lower than the professional service. However, the descriptions lacked in other quality dimensions (e.g., learning, a measure of how well an SD conveys the video’s intended message). While professional audio describers remain the gold standard, for content creators who cannot afford it, ViScene offers a cost-effective alternative, ultimately leading to a more accessible medium.
Keywords
Accessibility, deaf and hard of hearing, information visualization
Discipline
Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces
Research Areas
Intelligent Systems and Optimization
Publication
ASSETS '21: Proceedings of the 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, Virtual Conference, October 18-21
First Page
1
Last Page
15
ISBN
9781450383066
Identifier
10.1145/3441852.3471201
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
New York
Citation
NATALIE, Rosiana; LOH, Jolene Kar Inn; TAN, Huei Suen; TSENG, Joshua Shi-hao; CHAN, Ian Luke Yi-ren; JARJUE, Ebrima H.; KACORRI, Hernisa; and HARA, Kotaro.
The efficacy of collaborative authoring of video scene descriptions. (2021). ASSETS '21: Proceedings of the 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, Virtual Conference, October 18-21. 1-15.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6750
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/3441852.3471201