Exploring Community-Driven Descriptions for Making Livestreams Accessible

TL;DR

This paper investigates community-driven live description methods to improve livestream accessibility for visually impaired viewers, involving studies with sighted and visually impaired community members to evaluate different description approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach of engaging livestream community members as live describers and evaluates three description methods through user studies.

Findings

Community members can effectively provide live descriptions.

Different description methods impact viewer understanding and engagement.

Community feedback highlights key challenges and opportunities for accessibility improvements.

Abstract

People watch livestreams to connect with others and learn about their hobbies. Livestreams feature multiple visual streams including the main video, webcams, on-screen overlays, and chat, all of which are inaccessible to livestream viewers with visual impairments. While prior work explores creating audio descriptions for recorded videos, live videos present new challenges: authoring descriptions in real-time, describing domain-specific content, and prioritizing which complex visual information to describe. We explore inviting livestream community members who are domain experts to provide live descriptions. We first conducted a study with 18 sighted livestream community members authoring descriptions for livestreams using three different description methods: live descriptions using text, live descriptions using speech, and asynchronous descriptions using text. We then conducted a study with 9 livestream community members with visual impairments, who shared their current strategies and challenges for watching livestreams and provided feedback on the community-written descriptions. We conclude with implications for improving the accessibility of livestreams.