2015/11/19 by Valerie S. Morash, Yue-Ting Siu, Joshua A. Miele +2 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Digital Accessibility for Disabilities #Text Readability and Simplification
paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/2764916
openalex publication_date 2015/11/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/07
This article compares two methods of employing novice Web workers to author descriptions of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics images to make them accessible to individuals with visual and print-reading disabilities. The goal is to identify methods of creating image descriptions that are inexpensive, effective, and follow established accessibility guidelines. The first method explicitly presented the guidelines to the worker, then the worker constructed the image description in an empty text box and table. The second method queried the worker for image information and then used responses to construct a template-based description according to established guidelines. The descriptions generated through queried image description (QID) were more likely to include information on the image category, title, caption, and units. They were also more similar to one another, based on Jaccard distances of q-grams, indicating that their word usage and structure were more standardized. Last, the workers preferred describing images using QID and found the task easier. Therefore, explicit instruction on image-description guidelines is not sufficient to produce quality image descriptions when using novice Web workers. Instead, it is better to provide information about images, then generate descriptions from responses using templates.