Narrator: Today people increasingly use videos instead of text to communicate
information informs like lecture videos, how to videos, locks, and more.
In fact, people watch 1 billion hours of videos per day on YouTube alone
videos, videos provide information, both auditorally and visually, but the visual
content in videos is not accessible to blind visually impaired audience members.
Traditionally to make videos accessible.
professionals create audio descriptions that describe
the visual content in a video.
For example,
Audio Description: A wire cheese cutter slices through a balloon sculpture.
Narrator: However audio descriptions are rarely available
for user generated videos.
Despite the lack of audio descriptions, 12 blind and visually impaired people
who were interviewed still regularly use YouTube for a wide variety of
tasks, including keeping up with the current events, learning how to
dance and even repairing appliances.
All participants mentioned that they searched for videos that were already
inherently accessible, or understandable from the audio alone without additional
description of the visual content.
For example, a more accessible video may narrate each step of a chocolate chip
cookie demonstration in a medium bowl.
Baker: We're whisking together about 11 and a half ounces of all purpose flour,
and a solid tablespoon of kosher salt.
Narrator: while a less accessible video may only play background music or
only visually demonstrating the steps.
Interview participants reported that they evaluated videos to be accessible
or inaccessible based on properties of the original video, including audio
features such as presence of speech and informative language and visual
features such as infrequent visual changes and simple visual content, and
also audio visual features such as.
The description of objects, description of on-screen text and few visual references.
But, finding accessible videos with these properties can be
tedious and time consuming.
Participants reported that they had to use trial and error clicking on a
video, watch a portion of that video, and then returning to the search page
if the video was inaccessible -- then repeating the process and two,
they find an accessible option.
To help people easily identify accessible videos, we present seven
metrics and corresponding algorithms to automatically assess video accessibility.
Then, augment a search interface with accessibility metrics to let people
filter out inaccessible content.
So we ask two research questions in our paper.
First, can our seven video accessibility metrics indicate
video accessibility as perceived by blind, visually impaired users.
Second, will augmenting, a search interface with our video accessibility
metrics, improve video search for blind, visually impaired users.
To see if our seven metrics indicated accessibility, we collected
accessibility ratings from blind and visually impaired users for 60 videos.
A regression analysis indicated a statistically significant
relationship between a videos, accessibility and our proposed metrics.
The percentage of speech alone contributed to over 40% to the accessibility rating.
We also created a video search interface, augmented with our video accessibility
prediction and metrics and evaluated this interface in a user study of eight
blind and visually impaired users.
Participants unanimously preferred the metrics and filter interface when
searching for videos, they tried 54% fewer videos and spent 40% less time
finding a satisfying video compared to using the original YouTube interface.
Participants were really excited to use this tool and we are now
actively working on deploying it.
In the future, we'll use our metrics to give video authors and audio description
authors feedback on what portions of the video need further description.
Also video accessibility ratings in our study were rated
subjectively by blind users.
And there might be information that they're not aware of missing.
We're investigating the differences between their perceived accessibility
and objective accessibility of videos.
Finally, we are deploying this tool as a browser extension for
YouTube to find out what impact this tool will have in the long term.
Check out our paper to learn more about what makes videos accessible, automated
video accessibility metrics and our augmented video search interface.
Thank you.