Enhancing Video Communication Experience for Low Vision Users

In this paper, we investigate the impact of various video enhance ment techniques on the video chat user experience of people di agnosed with low vision. To this end, we present the results of an exploratory user study, in which participants with low vision were asked to utilize an accessibility-enhanced video chat client to per form two tasks (interviewing and facial emotion recognition). Par ticipants were able to individually configure the appearance of the video by defining several media enhancement parameters (e.g. con trast adaption, edge detection and enhancement, gray scale modes, etc.) to compensate for their own individual visual impairments. Our results show that individual video enhancement configurations positively impacted the video chat experience of the interview task. Also the second task benefited from the video enhancement, i.e., more facial emotions were correctly identified.