Towards Designing a Crowdsourcing Network for Visually Impaired Users

Sharing “blind-specific” information among people who are visually impaired, especially those in the same local community or of similar background, can be very valuable in promoting active and independent life styles. Unfortunately, while having gained tremendous popularity in recent years, existing Web 2.0 technologies/systems do not provide adequate support for effective information sharing among people with visual impairment. In this paper, we present the development of GoingEasy®, a social networking site built for crowdsourcing information that caters to the special needs of computer users with visual impairment. We describe our design and implementation of the site for achieving the desired crowdsourcing capability, and present user studies including those intended for establishing the design principles and those for evaluating the first version of the site. The evaluation experiments based on participants who are blind suggest that the proposed approaches for building GoingEasy® are effective and promising, and thus continued development may lead to a full-scale solution for providing a new and much-needed capability in the Web 2.0 world.