CAREER: Closed-Loop Crowd Support for People with Disabilities

为了克服无障碍问题，残疾人传统上依赖社区中其他人的支持。 例如，志愿者可以抽出几分钟的时间大声朗读盲人的邮件，或者同行者可以在公共汽车站回答一个简单的问题（例如，“这是第45集吗？”"). 专业人员，如手语翻译和音频描述的解说员，将感官信息转换成其他形式，使聋人学生能够参加传统的讲座，盲人能够欣赏电影。 互联网连接极大地扩大了潜在的人力支持者的范围，但仍然难以按需找到可靠的援助。 在这个项目中，PI的目标是使动态和多样化的人群能够通过Web（“人群”）交互式地支持残疾人。 这群人是任何碰巧有空的人，从在新兴的微任务市场上招募的有偿工作者，到通过现有社交网络招募的朋友和家人，再到愿意花几分钟时间的志愿者。 虽然总有人可用，但人群是动态的，单个工人可能不可靠。 因此，开发支持残疾人的交互式系统提出了许多挑战，包括如何实现实时和高质量的人群支持，如何设计即使在个人的指示可能不被遵循时也能提供有效反馈的界面，以及如何在不破坏确保可靠性的方法的情况下支持单个人群工作人员之间的协作。 为此，PI将通过一些应用程序探索闭环人群支持。 VizWiz Stream将使盲人用户能够与人群就其视觉环境进行互动对话。 AudioWiz Stream将提供近乎实时的语音转录。 而Legion和Legion VM将使人群能够集体承担键盘和鼠标的控制权，在现有的桌面界面上完成用户指定的任务（尽管人机交互的研究通常假设单个用户或在同一虚拟空间中协作的一组用户中的每一个都控制个人光标，这一项目将推动一种新的模式，由一个多样化和充满活力的群体共同作为一个单一的运营商）。 这些应用程序将为闭环人群支持提供通用模型，并将在实验室研究和盲人和聋人用户的现场部署中进行迭代改进和评估。 项目成果将使残疾人能够根据需要独立克服更多的无障碍问题。 PI将发布作为这项研究的一部分开发的软件工具作为开源代码，从而使其他研究人员能够建立在他的结果。 虽然这些工具最初是为盲人和聋人设计的，但对其他残疾人（如认知或运动障碍）也很有用，而非残疾人可能希望外包他们不能做、不想做或认为人群可能做得更好的互动任务。 PI将举办年度暑期课程，让盲人和聋人高中生开发闭环人群支持工具，并为不同残疾人提供支持;这些活动可鼓励部分残疾人士投身电脑行业，帮助开发和运行这些活动的本科生将获得个人接触无障碍计算和挑战的机会，残疾人在计算机中面临的问题，他们将带着这些问题进入他们的职业生涯。

To overcome accessibility problems, people with disabilities have traditionally relied upon the support of others in their community. For instance, a volunteer may offer a few minutes of her time to read a blind person's mail aloud, or a fellow traveler may answer a quick question at the bus stop (e.g., "Is that the 45 coming?"). Professionals such as sign language interpreters and narrators of audio descriptions convert sensory information into alternative forms that enable a deaf student to participate in a conventional lecture and a blind person to enjoy a movie. Internet connectivity has dramatically expanded the pool of potential human supporters, but finding reliable assistance on demand remains difficult. The PI's goal in this project is to enable dynamic and diverse groups of people reachable via the Web ("the crowd") to interactively support people with disabilities. The crowd is whoever happens to be available, from paid workers recruited on burgeoning micro-task marketplaces, to friends and family recruited via existing social networks, to volunteers willing to give a few minutes of their time. While someone is always available, the crowd is dynamic and individual workers can be unreliable. Thus, developing interactive systems to support people with disabilities presents numerous challenges, including how to enable crowd support that is real-time and high-quality, how to design interfaces that provide effective feedback even when an individual's directions may not be followed, and how to support collaboration among individual crowd workers without subverting methods of ensuring reliability. To these ends, the PI will explore closed-loop crowd support with a number of applications. VizWiz Stream will enable blind users to engage in an interactive conversation with the crowd about their visual environment. AudioWiz Stream will provide nearly real-time transcription of aural speech. And Legion and Legion VM will enable the crowd to collectively assume control of the keyboard and mouse to complete a user-specified task on existing desktop interfaces (whereas research in human-computer interaction usually assumes either a single user or a group of users collaborating in the same virtual space each in control of a personal cursor, this project will advance a new model in which a diverse and dynamic group collectively acts as a single operator). These applications will inform a common model for closed-loop crowd support, and will be iteratively improved and evaluated in lab studies and field deployments with blind and deaf users.Broader Impacts: Project outcomes will enable people with disabilities to overcome more accessibility problems independently and on demand. The PI will release the software tools developed as part of this research as open source code, thereby enabling other researchers to build on his results. Although initially intended for use by blind and deaf people, the tools will likely prove useful as well to people with other disabilities such as cognitive or motor impairments, and people without disabilities may want to outsource interactive tasks which they cannot do, do not want to do, or think the crowd may do better. The PI will conduct annual summer programs in which blind and deaf high school students will develop tools for closed-loop crowd support, and also serve as supporters for people with different disabilities; these activities may encourage some of the participants with disabilities to pursue careers in computing, and the undergraduate students who help develop and run these activities will gain personal exposure to accessible computing and the challenges people with disabilities face in computing that they will carry with them into their careers.