Blind and low vision (BLV) users often rely on alt text to understand what a digital image is showing. However, recent research has investigated how touch-based image exploration on touchscreens can supplement alt text. Touchscreen-based image exploration systems allow BLV users to deeply understand images while granting a strong sense of agency. Yet, prior work has found that these systems require a lot of effort to use, and little work has been done to explore these systems' bottlenecks on a deeper level and propose solutions to these issues. To address this, we present ImageAssist, a set of three tools that assist BLV users through the process of exploring images by touch -- scaffolding the exploration process. We perform a series of studies with BLV users to design and evaluate ImageAssist, and our findings reveal several implications for image exploration tools for BLV users.

翻译：盲人与低视力（BLV）用户通常依赖替代文本来理解数字图像所展示的内容。然而，近期研究探索了如何在触摸屏上通过基于触摸的图像探索来补充替代文本。基于触摸屏的图像探索系统能让BLV用户深入理解图像，同时赋予他们强烈的自主感。然而，先前研究发现这类系统使用起来需要大量努力，且很少有研究深入探讨这些系统的瓶颈并提出解决方案。为解决这一问题，我们推出了ImageAssist，一套包含三种工具的系统，旨在通过触摸辅助BLV用户完成图像探索过程——为探索过程搭建支架。我们与BLV用户合作开展了一系列研究来设计和评估ImageAssist，研究结果揭示了BLV用户图像探索工具开发的若干启示。