Phone app for the blind

Phone app for the blind’ lets them ‘see’ through crowd sourced answers.

London: A sighted person can tell at a glance if their clothes match before an important job interview, read their mail, understand menus in restaurants, check expiration dates and interpret street signs.

But blind people face a number of challenges when interacting with their environment because so much information is encoded visually. To get around this, a team consisting of computer scientists from several universities, including the University of Rochester - decided to outsource the task of problem-solving to people: specifically, to Amazon Mechanical Turk``s masses of online workers, reports New Scientist. They have developed VizWiz, a mobile application that allows users to identify objects based on human intelligence. Visually impaired users can take a photo, record a question about the photo, and then crowd sourced answers are received. The app owes its swiftness and accuracy to a marriage of computer chips and good old-fashioned human brainpower. ANI