OneThousand Words

1
One-Thousand Words
Enriching Digital Images to Improve Information
Accessibility

• Peter Parente
• Enabling Technology
• Spring 2003

2
A Different View

• Typical
• Assistive technology is a means for people with
  disabilities to function in society.
  
• Novel
• Assistive technology helps society accept all
  people.

3
Applied to Communication

• Do not build special tools for people with
  disabilities.
  
• Do not re-author data for people with
  disabilities.
  
• Instead, build tools that allow people to
  communicate with one another more effectively.

4
Visual Communication

• How do we easily and effectively share
  information that is traditionally visual
  (diagrams, photographs, movies, etc.) with people
  who have difficulty viewing and understanding the
  information?

5
Related Work

• Convert image regions into sound directly in a
  web browser (Roth, et al. 1998)
  
• Convert digital images to tactile form using
  image processing (Hernandez, Barner 2000)

6
Related Work

• Annotate webpages on the fly with text (Huang
  2000) (Takagi, Asakawa 2000)
  
• Classify images using XML markup (Mikovec, et al.
  2000)

7
A Common Theme

• All of these projects focus on augmenting digital
  images using some automated process.
  
• Are we too lazy to make improvements by hand? Is
  it too difficult? What if it were easier? Would
  people do it?

8
Assistive Augmentation

• Take existing software and data
• Put new data and features on top
• The result familiar software with better
  accessibility, more features, and more
  information.

9
Applied to Images

• Enriched Images
• Standard digital image
• Visual annotation
• Text annotation
• Speech annotation
• Tactile annotation

10
One-Thousand Words

• If a picture is worth a thousand words, then put
  those words back into the picture.
  
• Build a tool that allows people to create
  enriched images and share them with others.

11
Prototype

• Take standard digital images and add sound,
  speech, touch, and text markup.
  
• Allow people to explore the images with the new
  markup right in their web browser.

12
Prototype

• Three parts
• Editor Like Microsoft Paint, but with speech and
  sound
  
• Server A computer on the Internet that shares
  the overlays
  
• Viewer Puts the overlays right on top of images
  in Internet Explorer

13
Demo
14
Future Ideas

• Make markup available directly on images in a web
  browser
  
• Make markup available directly on top of other
  programs
  
• Make better markup tools
• Automate some of the process