Grapheel IRIS - crowdsourced descriptions of physics images to help BVI students
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by
klmasters
scientist, admin
Hi all, I thought this project was interesting, and something that Galaxy Zoo volunteers might be willing/able to help with. Please follow the instructions below if you are interested. This is not officially endorsed by The Zooniverse, it's something I became aware of via my University which is part of the South East (UK) Physics Network along with Sussex University (and others).
My name is Daniel Hajas. I am a final year Theoretical Physics student at the University of Sussex. I lost my sight 6 years ago, and so it has been quite a struggle for me to keep up with my classmates, especially when course material refers to figures or animations. (If you'd like to know more about me, you can find some links to videos and articles at the end of this message.)
In order to help other blind and visually impaired (BVI) students, my collaborators and I have embarked on a project (Grapheel IRIS) that will provide an online image description platform. The technical aspects of the webpage are now in place. We now need to recruit volunteers to carry out the descriptions.
The image descriptions typically take less than 2 minutes. Also, with a large pool of volunteers, the frequency of requests per person is low, since the stream of requests are distributed. Therefore, with practically no effort from a single volunteer, we can achieve significant progress in accessibility of graphical study resources to the BVI community. I know from my own experience, I know what a huge impact this will have.
How does IRIS work?
• blind or visually impaired (BVI) students upload an image of scientific content, graphs, diagrams.
• BVI students select a field of study (tag) e.g. physics, maths, chemistry etc. and a level of difficulty.
• BVI students can ask a specific question they would like to answered relating to figure.
• A pool of sighted volunteers with the necessary knowledge are assigned to groups of chosen disciplines based on their user settings of competency.
• When an image request is sent by a BVI student, the figure appears in a queue that all volunteers of a specific discipline can view and describe.
• If a request is accepted, the volunteer will give a description of the image based on provided guidelines.
• The recipient of the description can either accept the response, or ask for further clarification.We have already carried out successful alpha-test with 15 sighted and 1 BVI volunteers from the Sussex physics community. We are currently in the process of expanding by a factor of ten (150 sighted, 10 BVI) from the SEPnet physics community to carry out a beta-test. Assuming the beta-test is successful, we will make a public launch in early 2017, with the aim expanding the user base by another factor of ten, and to extend service to all STEM subjects.
As this is only the second version we are looking for early adapters who don’t mind bugs, incomplete features and will be willing to give us feedback.
If you would be happy to become a volunteer, please let us know by replying to this e-mail or at contact@grapheel.com. Then we will send you a URL to access the service, your username, password and a “How to get started” instruction.
Thank you in advance - Daniel Hajas on behalf of The Grapheel team
Links about Daniel and the project:
- LinkedIn profile: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/daniel-hajas-057211118
- Grapheel IRIS http://www.grapheel.com/home/suite-of-web-services/
- Reuters report http://uk.reuters.com/video/2016/01/11/blind-student-devises-audio-tactile-grap?videoId=366991542
- Posters in Parliament attendance http://www.sussex.ac.uk/students/newsandevents/?id=34153 and Junior Research Associate award http://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/32662
- Startup Sussex business competition finalists http://www.sussex.ac.uk/internal/bulletin/student/2015-16/030516/startupsussexwinners
- Through my vision (student documentary video) https://vimeo.com/128884808
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