Blind Photographers and VizSnap

Abstract

This paper describes a long term user study in which 13 blind participants were asked to use a blind friendly iPhone app, VizSnap -- an app designed to assist blind people in organizing and browsing a photo library without sight -- for a total of two months. VizSnap records audio while the user is aiming the camera, and allows an optional voice memo to be recorded, to allow the user to give custom information to accompany the photo, as well as capturing time, date, and location the photo was taken. All this information is available to the user when browsing through VizSnap's photo library. The participants met with us every two weeks, in which we discuss general VizSnap usage, conduct a short user study with their photos, as well as upload all data that was gathered using VizSnap. The user study aims to determine whether accompanying audio, time, date, and location metadata assists in memory retrieval of photos by blind people. We found that in general, both ambient audio and voice memo are considered most helpful for memory retrieval.