Revamp: Enhancing Accessible Information Seeking Experience of Online Shopping for Blind or Low Vision Users

TL;DR

Revamp is a browser-based system that improves online shopping accessibility for blind or low vision users by utilizing review-based question-answering to provide detailed product descriptions and facilitate information retrieval.

Contribution

The paper introduces Revamp, a novel system that enhances accessible online shopping by leveraging customer reviews for interactive visual information retrieval for BLV users.

Findings

Revamp provided useful descriptive information for product appearance.

It helped users locate key information efficiently.

Participants found the system improved their shopping experience.

Abstract

Online shopping has become a valuable modern convenience, but blind or low vision (BLV) users still face significant challenges using it, because of: 1) inadequate image descriptions and 2) the inability to filter large amounts of information using screen readers. To address those challenges, we propose Revamp, a system that leverages customer reviews for interactive information retrieval. Revamp is a browser integration that supports review-based question-answering interactions on a reconstructed product page. From our interview, we identified four main aspects (color, logo, shape, and size) that are vital for BLV users to understand the visual appearance of a product. Based on the findings, we formulated syntactic rules to extract review snippets, which were used to generate image descriptions and responses to users' queries. Evaluations with eight BLV users showed that Revamp 1) provided useful descriptive information for understanding product appearance and 2) helped the participants locate key information efficiently.