Toward Scalable Social Alt Text: Conversational Crowdsourcing as a Tool for Refining Vision-to-Language Technology for the Blind

The access of visually impaired users to imagery in social media is constrained by the availability of suitable alt text. It is unknown how imperfections in emerging tools for automatic caption generation may help or hinder blind users’ understanding of social media posts with embedded imagery. In this paper, we study how crowdsourcing can be used both for evaluating the value provided by existing automated approaches and for enabling workflows that provide scalable and useful alt text to blind users. Using real-time crowdsourcing, we designed experiences that varied the depth of interaction of the crowd in assisting visually impaired users at caption interpretation, and measured trade-offs in effectiveness, scalability, and reusability. We show that the shortcomings of existing AI image captioning systems frequently hinder a user’s understanding of an image they cannot see to a degree that even clarifying conversations with sighted assistants cannot correct. Our detailed analysis of the set of clarifying conversations collected from our studies led to the design of experiences that can effectively assist users in a scalable way without the need for real-time interaction. They also provide lessons and guidelines that human captioners and the designers of future iterations of AI captioning systems can use to improve labeling of social media imagery for blind users.