“AT MY CURRENT VISION, SEEING PHOTOS ON SOCIAL MEDIA IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE”: HOW MIXED ABILITY COLLABORATION CAN HELP PHOTO SHARING AND VIEWING Reeti Mathur Submitted to the faculty of the School of Informatics and Computing in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction, Indiana University - IUPUI May 2019 2 Accepted by the Faculty of Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction Master’s Thesis Committee Dr. Erin Brady, Assistant professor, Chair Dr. Davide Bolchini, Chair Dr. Andrew Miller, Assistant Professor 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A sincere wish of gratitude for all who have supported me through these two years of study.
I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Erin Brady in guiding me through my research studies at IUPUI. I would also like to thank the participants who have given their inputs to help me run this research work. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE PG.
NO Abstract 6 Chapter One: Introduction and Background 7 Chapter Two: Literature Review 13 Chapter Three: Methodology 19 Chapter Four: Results 26 Chapter Five: Inferences from the Overall Results 42 Chapter Six: Discussion 49 Chapter Seven: Future Work and Conclusion 52 References 54 5 ABSTRACT “AT MY CURRENT VISION, SEEING PHOTOS ON SOCIAL MEDIA IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE”: HOW MIXED ABILITY COLLABORATION CAN HELP PHOTO SHARING AND VIEWING. Users of social media sites share millions of photographs every day. These posts are mostly inaccessible to people who are blind or visually impaired, since they are not accompanied by alternative text descriptions of the image contents which can be read by a screenreader. Although some platforms generate automated image descriptions, these descriptions do not convey the details of the photograph expected by screenreader users.
To address this, I designed a mixed methods study involving a collaborative photograph accessibility activity in Facebook groups, and pre and post-activity surveys. I found that online social collaboration between people who are blind or visually impaired and their sighted peers can be beneficial to describe the context of the photograph, provide detailed alt-text, and review the photographs for clarity (a) before the blind or visually impaired users upload their own photographs on Facebook and (b) while interacting with other’s photographs on social media sites. 6 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION & BACKGROUND Introduction “At my current vision, seeing photos on social media is almost impossible. Social media sites are increasingly used to share photographs and images [11].
Users bearing social media accounts primarily post status updates in the form of photographs as a means of their daily- life information sharing process, to seek attention and affection from known acquaintances or simply to indulge in social communications [10]. Users who are Blind or Visually Impaired (BVI) often encounter the challenge of being unable to interact with these photographs posted on social media sites due to missing alternative text, multiple times each time they go online while participating in this media-centric environment [16]. First, visual posts uploaded by others are rarely accessible [16]. To make online images and photographs accessible, they must be supplemented with Alternative Text Descriptions (ATDs), which provide a textual description of the content of the image.
Although there are automated features which generate these alternative text descriptions for photographs, like Facebook’s Automatic Alternative Text (AAT) [21], these computer-generated descriptions are not always able to provide sufficient detail required to understand a photograph. As a result, BVI social media users often get frustrated when encountering inaccessible photographs posted by others [3]. Second, social media users with visual impairments may encounter accessibility problems when trying to share photographs of their own. They may find it strenuous to select a particular photo amongst many others from their digital album on their mobile or desktop devices [8].
They may also not be confident of its clarity – whether the photo is free from blurred contents, if the contrast 7 and saturation of the photo is comprehensible, or simply whether it is the right photo used for the intended purpose or not. As a result of these accessibility problems, people with visual impairments are limited in the ways they can participate on social media sites. Through this study, I recommend prospective online social collaborations between the BVI social media users and their Sighted Peers (SP) to address social media inaccessibility for photograph- related posts. Although previous research in HCI has explored the concepts of volunteerism [5][18][17] and friendsourcing [4] to achieve web accessibility by collaborating with web workers and volunteers, I find potential scope in establishing a collaboration among the BVI people and their sighted friends and family on these social platforms to (a) construct detailed Alternative Text Descriptions (ATDs) to upload their own photographs (b) review the photograph contents and context before uploading them (c) generate textual descriptions for inaccessible photographs posted by others and (d) indirectly motivate the online sighted community to upload media-related posts bearing an appropriate and detailed alternative-text description that screenreader users expect.
This concept of social collaboration with sighted peers is pragmatic, given the frequency, hesitation and relentlessness of the BVI people routing their photographs to unknown web workers or other volunteers. In this study, I first describe the trends and results obtained from a Twitter inventory comprising of tweets the people with visual impairments and other sighted people in the field of Access Technologies have made, followed by a detailed deductive analysis of the field study of mixed- ability collaboration for image accessibility that was conducted on Facebook. Specifically, small Facebook groups were facilitated where two blind or visually impaired participants, and 12 of their sighted peers, could collaborate on reviewing and describing image-based content on their separate closed Facebook groups respectively. 8 Through this study, I identified three major trends: 1.
ATDs provided by a group of Sighted Peers (SPs) are more effective than those generated by Automatic Alt-Text (AAT) features because the descriptions generated manually by the SPs incorporate extra, contextualized details when compared to the low-confidence results from the AAT. Collaboration could help sighted peers improve the way they construct ATDs and inspire them to post their own photographs with detailed and appropriate alt-text. A collaboration among several sighted peers is more efficient than a single peer because the details missed by one peer could be covered by another. Background According to the National Federation of the Blind (NFB)1, 7.6 million Americans (around 3.9 million females and the rest males) are blind or visually impaired.
Over 63,357 students aged 4 years to 20 years are also found to be blind or visually impaired. These statistics reveal that from a global population of 285 million people who are blind or visually impaired2, 2.6% of these BVI people reside in the United States. This statistical data informs the necessity of addressing web accessibility for the people with visual impairments to be able to easily access their social media accounts and also 1 National Federation of the Blind https://nfb.org/resources/blindness-statistics 2 Visually Impaired Users on an Online Social Network https://www.net/publication/266655702_Visually_impaired_users_on_an_online_social_ network 9 interact with photographs and media-related posts without any inaccessible conditions or frustrations. The use of accessible screenreaders in the form of voiceovers or talkback features have enabled these people with visual impairments to easily interact with technology.
According to a Screen Reader User Survey conducted by WebAIM in the year 20173, it is found that 60% of the 1792 global visually impaired participants who reside in North America use screenreaders. Screenreaders read the web page or application from top to bottom. Screenreaders primarily read content through audio and visual cues. Through this survey, it is observed that 75.6% of the global respondents primarily prefer audio cues over video.
There are various types of screenreaders available. Some of the most extensively used screenreaders are JAWS (66%), NVDA (64.6%) among the many others like ZoomText, Window-Eyes, ChromeVox and Narrator. Of the 1792 global participants, 88% use mobile screenreaders on their Apple iPhone, iPad or iPod touch (75.6%) and Android devices (22%) as well. Mobile screen readers mainly comprise of VoiceOver (69%), TalkBack for Android (29.5%) among the many others like Voice Assistant, Nuance Talks and MobileSpeak.
54% of the respondents mentioned that they use desktop/laptop/mobile/tablet versions of the devices about the same duration of time. However, the chances of them interacting with web sites is recorded to be higher at 54% than the 46% usage of mobile applications. 3 Screenreader User Survey https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/ 10 This survey also provides the statistics on how accessible social media sites are as of the year 2016.9% of the respondents found that social media sites are very accessible, 54.3% found that they are somewhat accessible, 14.5% said that they are somewhat inaccessible, and 4.9% of them mentioned that they are very inaccessible. These screenreaders that are present in most Android and iOS smartphones, laptops, handheld and desktop computers read textual information in the form of descriptive alternative text written for media content such as photographs, images, gifs or videos.
If an appropriate and accurate alternative text for an image or other media-related content is missing, these screenreaders rather read the file name that is associated with the image by default, for example; img001 or screenshot2019 etc. These default file names mean nothing to the BVI users and does not do any justice in explaining the actual context of the photo, thus rendering it completely inaccessible. Hence, alternative text descriptions are very essential for the BVI people to understand and interact with media-related content. Screenreaders not only read textual and media content, but also enable the BVI people to navigate through various applications on their smartphones, laptops or handheld and desktop computers by reading aloud the name of the application and the different types of user interface elements that comprise these applications like web links, URLs, buttons, forms etc.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to provide standards on web accessibility aimed at various organizations and individuals 4. WCAG provides the essential tips and syntax templates that help create an accurate and appropriate alternative text description for media-related image content5 that web developers, designers and media content specialists can learn from. It also provides guidelines on the exact 4 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Overview https://www.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/ 5 Easy Checks – A First Review of Web Accessibility https://www.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary/ 11 location in the code where the alternative text resides in a webpage – the part of the code that contains the link to the source of the image. With the advent of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and their extravagant use to share daily-life updates and indulge in social conversations and interactions with other peers and acquaintances by uploading photographs and images, a number of challenges arise related to web inaccessibility – especially related to inaccessible visual content and photographs.
Sighted social media users often tend to upload their photographs without typing an appropriate alternative text or textual descriptions, invariable leading to inaccessible conditions and frustrations faced by their BVI peers. There is an increasing need to bridge this gap by encouraging the online sighted community to upload photographs bearing an appropriate alternative text, and also build collaborative associations between the BVI people and their sighted peers in order to construct accurate and appropriate alternative text descriptions for inaccessible photographs uploaded by others and the photographs yet to be uploaded by the BVI people. 12 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW Photo Inaccessibility due to Missing Alternative Text Prior research in the field of Human Computer Interaction has explored this concept of addressing social accessibility of mixed- media across a variety of websites by collaborating online with potential web workers [14] and volunteers [17] through friendsourcing [4] to achieve web accessibility needs. In the past, researchers have also explored the use of algorithmic automated features such as the Facebook Automatic Alternative Text (AAT) feature [21] to create textual descriptions.
