The Emerging Professional Practice of Remote Sighted Assistance for People with Visual Impairments

Privacy Concerns for Visual Assistance Technologies

“…Prior work has studied VAT usage, including the types of images and questions blind people share with VATs [19,25,44,46,47], what information blind people want in image descriptions [40ś43, 95], ethical considerations regarding AI [13], user-centered evaluations of the accuracy of AI-powered visual descriptions [70], as well as how remote sighted assistants provide visual assistance [64,90].…”

“…It's a nice notion, but I forget about it when I'm actually using the service. ž Another policy that participants brought up in the context of Aira related to the companies mandates for its employed agents (sometimes referred to as remote sighted assistants [64]) to self-identify at the beginning of a call. P05 noted, łWith Aira, agents identify themselves.…”

“…Our dataset includes privacy policies from 13 companies as listed in Table 6. This set of companies covers popular camera-based applications used by blind people, as represented in the academic literature on visual assistance (e.g., [40,64,95]) and based on our experience conducting research with blind people: Aira, Be My Eyes, BeSpecular, KNFB Reader, Lookout, LookTel MoneyReader/Recognizer, OrCam MyEye, Seeing AI, and TapTapSee. These applications support a variety of use cases, types of camera-based devices, and visual data input types (images and videos) as shown in Table 6.…”

“…This may be due to an understanding that developing AI-powered visual assistance depends on large amounts of data whereas human visual assistance may not require the same data conigurations and training to generate useful descriptions. Additionally, while contemporary media commonly reference the need for collecting and processing user data to improve automated technologies, it is less clear how sighted assistants are trained [64]. Following Lee et al [64], future work may be conducted to reveal what information is used to train visual sighted assistants, albeit with greater emphasis on how they are trained to accurately provide visual assistance while preserving users' privacy, versus the methods and data required to train AI-powered VATs.…”

Design of a Personal Mobility Device for Elderly Users

“…Various applications developed for those with limited vision can also serve the elderly. For example, BlindSquare [8][9][10] is an app that is designed to help the visually impaired navigate cities by describing the environment, warning of intersections, providing directions, and recommending possible places of interest-services that prove useful for the elderly.…”