CAREER: Closed-Loop Crowd Support for People with Disabilities

为了克服无障碍问题，残疾人传统上依靠社区中其他人的支持。例如，一个志愿者可能会抽出几分钟的时间来朗读盲人的邮件，或者一个路人可能会在公共汽车站回答一个简短的问题（例如，“45路车来了吗？”）。手语翻译和音频解说等专业人士将感觉信息转换为另一种形式，使聋哑学生能够参加传统的讲座，盲人能够欣赏电影。互联网的连接极大地扩大了潜在的人类支持者的数量，但找到可靠的援助仍然很困难。PI在这个项目中的目标是使动态的和多样化的人群能够通过Web（“人群”）进行交互支持残疾人。“人群”指的是任何碰巧有时间的人，从新兴的微任务市场上招募的有偿员工，到通过现有社交网络招募的朋友和家人，再到愿意抽出几分钟时间的志愿者。虽然总有人有空，但群体是动态的，个别员工可能不可靠。因此，开发支持残疾人的互动系统面临着许多挑战，包括如何实现实时和高质量的群体支持，如何设计即使在个人指示可能不被遵循的情况下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个体群体工作人员之间的协作。为了达到这些目的，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他们的视觉环境进行互动对话。AudioWiz Stream将提供近乎实时的语音转录。Legion和Legion VM将使人群能够共同控制键盘和鼠标，以完成现有桌面界面上的用户指定任务（而人机交互研究通常假设单个用户或一组用户在同一虚拟空间协作，每个用户都控制个人光标，该项目将推进一个新的模型，其中一个多样化和动态的群体集体充当单个操作员）。这些应用程序将为闭环人群支持的通用模型提供信息，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。更广泛的影响：项目成果将使残疾人能够独立地、按需地克服更多的无障碍问题。PI将把作为这项研究的一部分开发的软件工具作为开放源代码发布，从而使其他研究人员能够以他的结果为基础。虽然最初是为盲人和聋哑人设计的，但这些工具可能也会被证明对有其他残疾（如认知或运动障碍）的人有用，而没有残疾的人可能想要外包他们不能做、不想做或认为人群可能做得更好的交互式任务。PI将每年举办夏季项目，让盲人和聋哑人高中学生开发闭环群众支持工具，并为不同残疾人提供支持；这些活动可能会鼓励一些残疾参与者从事计算机方面的职业，而帮助开发和开展这些活动的本科生将获得个人接触无障碍计算的机会，以及残疾人在计算方面面临的挑战，这些挑战将伴随他们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.