Smartphone cameras bring further independence to Visually Impaired People
The most recent visual assistance product to hit the app store is VizWiz. As well as giving you automated image recognition from intelligent software, it throws your questions open to a small band of volunteers standing-by on the internet - a human cloud, willing to donate ten seconds of their time here and there to describe photos which come in.
The VizWiz is described as: "Take a Picture, Speak a Question, and Get an Answer".
The free app and service, developed by the University of Rochester in New York, has received between ten and 12 thousand questions in its first two months. The volunteers are made up of staff and students who receive a sound alert when a question arrives, either via Twitter, text message or the web. They tap in a response which is received by the original sender.
"The most popular type of question is a product that they have which has text written on it, a label with instructions. People want to know what it says, how to cook it or when it expires," said Professor Jeff Bigham, the man behind the service.
"Around one or two eastern time we start getting questions about wine from what we assume is the UK, asking what label, what year, that kind of thing."
Taking pictures
How do you hold the camera up? And how close do you put it to the object you want to know more about? Angles, perspective, distance and light, are concepts that don't come naturally to people who have never been able to see.
Steve Nutt is an IT consultant in Hertfordshire who has been blind since birth. It took him two weeks to master how to frame a shot which he does in a very functional way, quite different to how sighted people would do it.
He explains: "If you're taking a picture of, say, a tin, you need to make sure you get the whole tin in there. I would stand it up so you get all the sides with the label and snap from about 8 inches above it.
"If you are taking a picture of some text on a piece of paper, centralise the camera and lift it up about ten inches. Keep your hand dead straight and dead still when taking the image.
"You have to also bear in mind the size of the thing you're taking the picture of. The smaller the thing, the closer you need to be to it ... I'd be lying if I said it was easy."
Jeff Bigham's team sees the results of the camerawork coming from users like Steve. Not everyone gets it right with their first shot.
"We definitely get a few attempts sometimes. It's not always easy to frame the photos. Sometimes the centre is out of the photo. If they're asking what is on a can of soup label, we generally say 'we can't tell what this is, the label is likely on the other side of the can'."
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