vizwiz

VizWiz is a mobile application and platform designed to help blind and visually impaired people obtain information about their surroundings by crowdsourcing descriptions from volunteers. Users capture a photo with their smartphone and may include a question about the image. The submission is sent to a pool of crowd workers who view the image and provide a spoken or written description or answer. The response is delivered back to the user, typically in real time, enabling rapid decisions in everyday tasks such as identifying objects, reading labels, or locating a landmark.

The service relies on human interpreters to supply detailed, context-rich descriptions that augment or surpass automated vision systems. It emphasizes accessibility features and user control, including privacy protections such as the option to blur faces or limit the data shared with the crowd.

VizWiz has been described in academic literature on assistive technology and crowdsourcing as an effective approach to enabling visually impaired users to access visual information through a human-in-the-loop system. It has contributed to datasets and methodological insights for real-time description tasks and has influenced subsequent research and development in crowd-powered tools for accessibility.

Overall, VizWiz is noted for illustrating the potential and limitations of crowd-based vision assistance on mobile devices, serving as a notable case study in how crowdsourcing can complement automated image understanding to support independence for people who are blind or have low vision.