Using Computer Vision to Access Appliance Displays

People who are blind or visually impaired face difficulties accessing a growing array of everyday appliances, needed to perform a variety of daily activities, because they are equipped with electronic displays. We are developing a “Display Reader” smartphone app, which uses computer vision to help a user acquire a usable image of a display, to address this problem. The current prototype analyzes video from the smartphone’s camera, providing real-time feedback to guide the user until a satisfactory image is acquired, based on automatic estimates of image blur and glare. Formative studies were