VisPhoto: Photography for People with Visual Impairments via Post-Production of Omnidirectional Camera Imaging.

Many people with visual impairments would like to take photographs. However, they often have difficulty pointing the camera at the target. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a novel photo-taking system called VisPhoto. Unlike conventional methods, VisPhoto generates a photograph in post-production. When the shutter button is pressed, VisPhoto captures an omnidirectional camera image that contains the surrounding scene of the camera. In post-production, the system outputs a cropped region as a "photograph" that satisfies the user's preference. We conducted an experiment consisting of two parts. First, 24 people with visual impairments took photographs with a genuine iPhone camera app, a conventional method, and VisPhoto. Second, 20 sighted people evaluated the quality of the photographs. The experimental results showed that the participants with visual impairments preferred to use VisPhoto to take photographs of difficult targets, whereas they preferred the conventional method for easy targets. Moreover, we revealed that their preferences for photo-taking methods were influenced by the participants' needs and values about photography and their confidence in their photographic abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]