2023/10/10 by Daniel Killough, Amy Pavel, Killough, Daniel +1 · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Digital Accessibility for Disabilities #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) #Multimedia Communication and Technology #Subtitles and Audiovisual Media
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.07057
openalex publication_date 2023/10/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
People watch livestreams to connect with others and learn about their hobbies. Livestreams feature multiple visual streams including the main video, webcams, on-screen overlays, and chat, all of which are inaccessible to livestream viewers with visual impairments. While prior work explores creating audio descriptions for recorded videos, live videos present new challenges: authoring descriptions in real-time, describing domain-specific content, and prioritizing which complex visual information to describe. We explore inviting livestream community members who are domain experts to provide live descriptions. We first conducted a study with 18 sighted livestream community members authoring descriptions for livestreams using three different description methods: live descriptions using text, live descriptions using speech, and asynchronous descriptions using text. We then conducted a study with 9 livestream community members with visual impairments, who shared their current strategies and challenges for watching livestreams and provided feedback on the community-written descriptions. We conclude with implications for improving the accessibility of livestreams.