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Non-Visual Accessibility Assessment of Videos

Video accessibility is crucial for blind screen-reader users as online videos are increasingly playing an essential role in education, employment, and entertainment. While there exist quite a few techniques and guidelines that focus on creating accessible videos, there is a dearth of research that attempts to characterize the accessibility of existing videos. Therefore in this paper, we define and investigate a diverse set of video and audio-based accessibility features in an effort to characterize accessible and inaccessible videos. As a ground truth for our investigation, we built a custom dataset of 600 videos, in which each video was assigned an accessibility score based on the number of its wins in a Swiss-system tournament, where human annotators performed pairwise accessibility comparisons of videos. In contrast to existing accessibility research where the assessments are typically done by blind users, we recruited sighted users for our effort, since videos comprise a special case where sight could be required to better judge if any particular scene in a video is presently accessible or not. Subsequently, by examining the extent of association between the accessibility features and the accessibility scores, we could determine the features that significantly (positively or negatively) impact video accessibility and therefore serve as good indicators for assessing the accessibility of videos. Using the custom dataset, we also trained machine learning models that leveraged our handcrafted features to either classify an arbitrary video as accessible/inaccessible or predict an accessibility score for the video. Evaluation of our models yielded an F1 score of 0.675 for binary classification and a mean absolute error of 0.53 for score prediction, thereby demonstrating their potential in video accessibility assessment while also illuminating their current limitations and the need for further research in this area.