Comparative Survey of Blind, Low-Vision and Sighted Workers on Crowdsourcing Platform

Crowdsourcing offers a new form of work that makes it easy for people to work from home on their computers. The completion of tasks, however, can be difficult for those who have certain disabilities, such as visual impairment. There is a lack of research on comparing visually impaired and sighted crowd workers on non-English crowdsourcing platforms. This research aims to determine the best ways to support visually impaired workers with AI and change the modality to improve the performance of visually impaired crowd workers, especially screen reader users. This study used a questionnaire with 10 visually impaired and 20 sighted crowd workers to investigate the problems encountered by visually impaired people on Japanese crowdsourcing platforms. The key findings are as follows. (1) The number of task types for visually impaired workers is limited compared to the types of tasks finished by sighted workers on crowdsourcing platforms. (2) More accessible platforms and tasks for screen readers are crucial for visually impaired crowd workers. (3) The time taken by visually impaired crowd workers to perform tasks is a crucial problem. We also include suggestions for future work as part of this study and provide future directions.