Crowd Accessibility

An approach that combines human intelligence with machine intelligence to create accessible content and services for people with disabilities. In crowd accessibility, micro-tasks that automated systems cannot yet perform reliably — such as describing images, identifying objects, or providing navigation guidance — are distributed to human workers via crowdsourcing platforms. The human-generated data both provides immediate accessibility benefits and serves as training data for machine learning systems, creating a feedback loop where automated capabilities gradually improve. Examples include services like Be My Eyes, where sighted volunteers describe visual scenes for blind callers, and VizWiz, where crowd workers answer visual questions from blind users.