[Access Lunch] [Accessibility Lunch] - 3/17 GHC 6115 @ 12 PM

[Peya Mowar]

Hi everyone, This Monday, we have Prof. Elisa Kreiss from UCLA joining us  
in-person for accessibility lunch. Please find the talk details below:  
Title: How communicative principles (should) shape AI for non-visual  
accessibility Abstract: Images have become an omnipresent communicative  
tool that we use in all aspects of life. However, the undeniable benefits  
they carry for sighted communicators turns into a serious accessibility  
challenge for people who are blind or have low vision (BLV). BLV users  
often have to rely on textual descriptions of those images to equally  
participate in an ever-increasing image-dominated (online) lifestyle.  
Despite the extraordinary performance of current large-scale AI models on  
many image-to-text tasks, these models repeatedly fail to live up to their  
promised benchmark performance once they’re put into real-world setups. In  
this talk, I will present my work which shows that incorporating  
fundamental cognitive and linguistic principles is crucial for making  
Vision-Language models useful for image accessibility. I argue that the  
next frontier is moving from what can be truthfully said about an image to  
the pragmatic problem of what should be said about it given the context and  
the user’s goals. Based on cognitive experiments with highly sighted and  
BLV participants, I will present evidence in support of this hypothesis and  
demonstrate that the communicative goal of the image and text needs to  
become a fundamental component for datasets and evaluation protocols to  
build image description systems that can generalize to real-world  
scenarios. I will conclude by showing that situating current  
state-of-the-art AI models in communicative contexts improves model  
alignment with people’s accessibility needs. Taken together, this work  
provides fundamental insights into how people communicate about the visual  
world, and shows how we can use those insights to advance AI models for  
accessibility. Bio: Elisa Kreiss is an Assistant Professor of Communication  
at UCLA and the lab director of the Coalas (Computation and Language for  
Society) Lab. Previously, she completed a PhD in Linguistics at Stanford,  
where she was a member of Stanford’s NLP group and the Stanford Data  
Science Center for Open and REproducible Science (CORES). More details:  
https://www.coalas-lab.co We will meet in GHC 6115 for this fascinating  
talk! Thanks and regards, Peya

Accessibility Lunch Seminar
Monday Mar 17, 2025 ⋅ 12pm – 1pm
Eastern Time - New York

Location
GHC 6115, Gates and Hillman Centers, 3, Gates Hillman Complex, 4902 Forbes  
Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA	
https://www.google.com/maps/search/GHC+6115,+Gates+and+Hillman+Centers,+3,+Gates+Hillman+Complex,+4902+Forbes+Ave,+Pittsburgh,+PA+15213,+USA?hl=en



Attachments
Accessibility Lunch Schedule 2024  
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1k1Pmh9jo-N7S73Fi10y-5tEynvhw3xLbPf-NMAjTSxU

CMU Accessibility Lunch Seminar SeriesAbout: This seminar series explores  
the evolution and future directions of accessibility research and practice.  
Each week, we discuss diverse facets of accessible and assistive  
technologies, featuring speakers from academia, industry, and beyond. The  
seminar is organised by the Accessibility Research Group at Carnegie Mellon  
University.Peya Mowar is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.Join Zoom  
Meetinghttps://cmu.zoom.us/j/99282851029?pwd=CUYhUGEykBYvMAGO2zwKeoig3abPzN.1Meeting  
ID: 992 8285 1029Passcode: a11y---One tap  
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Guests
Peya Mowar - creator
accessibility-lunch at lists.andrew.cmu.edu


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