A Survey of Visually Impaired Workers in Japanese and US Crowdsourcing
Platforms
Ying Zhong1 , Makoto Kobayashi2 , Masaki Matsubara3 , Atsuyuki Morishima3
1

School of Integrative and Global Majors, University of Tsukuba
2Faculty of Health Science, Tsukuba University of Technology
3
Faculty of Library, Information and Media Science, University of Tsukuba
ying.zhong.2018d@mlab.info, koba@cs.k.tsukuba-tech.ac.jp, masaki@slis.tsukuba.ac.jp, mori@slis.tsukuba.ac.jp

Abstract
Crowdsourcing offers a new form of work that makes it easyfor people to work from home on their own computers. However, for some people with disabilities, such as visual impairment, problems are encountered in completing tasks. In thisstudy, a questionnaire was used to investigate the working
conditions of and problems encountered by visually impaired
people on Japanese and US crowdsourcing platforms. The
problems overcome by visually impaired people, difference
between the visually impaired crowd workers from different
countries, and possible solutions are provided herein. This research can be extended to more crowdsourcing platforms andlanguages in the future.

Introduction
Crowdsourcing offers a new form of work that makes it easy
for people to work from home on their own computers. An
increasing number of crowdsourcing platforms (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk 1 , Upwork 2 , Japan’s Yahoo! Crowdsourcing 3 and CrowdWorks 4 ) are emerging.
Crowd workers can choose the task that they can performin the crowdsourcing platform. However, for some people
with disabilities, such as visually impaired people, there areproblems in performing tasks (Zyskowski et al. 2015). Thisis one of the limitations of the general-purpose crowdsourcing platforms today.
There are 285 million visually impaired individuals
worldwide (Bourne, Price, and Stevens 2012). Crowdsourcing can potentially offer a form of employment to people
with disabilities (Zyskowski et al. 2015). Existing literature
claims that crowdsourcing is promising for the employmentof visually impaired people (Vashistha, Sethi, and Anderson2018). As we will show, visually impared workers are doinga variety of tasks, but most existing studies have focused ontranscription tasks.
Presented in the Work in Progress and Demo track, HCOMP 2020.
Copyright by the author(s).
1
Amazon Mechanical Turk: https://www.mturk.com
2
Upwork: https://www.upwork.com/
3
Yahoo! Crowdsourcing: https://crowdsourcing.yahoo.co.jp
4
Crowdworks: https://crowdworks.jp

In this study, an online survey was conducted to investigate the current status of crowdsourcing tasks and the problems encountered by visually impaired workers when performing these tasks. A possible solution to increase the number of potential workers, including visually impaired workers, who can get new jobs in a crowdsourcing platform hasbeen provided herein.
Language is an interesting factor in performing microtasks. For example, the transcription task is suitable forEnglish-speaking users; however, Japanese and Chinese
users may encounter some problems because there are manyhomophones.
An online questionnaire on English and Japanese was prepared on main crowdsourcing platforms Amazon Mechanical Turk, CrowdWorks, and Yahoo! Crowdsourcing. These
three platforms provide microtask functions. A total of 91(about 30 for each platform) visually impaired crowd workers were recruited to investigate their working conditions
and problems encountered on crowdsourcing platforms. The
need for blind crowd workers was also analyzed.
The findings of this study are presented below:• The number of task types for visually impaired crowdworkers is limited.
• The time taken by visually impaired crowd workers toperform tasks is a general problem.
• The behaviors of visually impaired crowd workers are different because of the differences in language and screen
reader.
The contributions of this study are presented below:• Problems overcome by visually impaired people on threemain crowdsourcing platforms (in English and Japanese)were identified.
• Possible solutions for decreasing the working time andimproving the performance were obtained.

Related Work
Visually impaired crowd workers
Zyskowski et al. (Zyskowski et al. 2015) performed the firstformal study on crowd workers with disabilities by conducting in-depth open-ended interviews and a survey with dis-abilities. There were several barriers to accessibility and usability.
This survey was conducted in English only on one crowdsourcing platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk. This study
is focused on the visually impaired workers on three main
crowdsourcing platforms (in English and Japanese).

Microtasks for visually impaired people
BSpeak is an accessible crowdsourcing marketplace that enables blind people in developing regions to earn money bytranscribing audio files containing speech (Vashistha, Sethi,and Anderson 2018). The transcription task is suitable forEnglish-speaking users. However, Japanese users encounter
some problems because there are many homophones.

SurveyAn online survey was conducted on three main crowdsourcing platforms in English and Japanese.
A total of 91 visually impaired crowd workers (30 crowdworkers each in Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdWorksand 31 crowd workers in Yahoo! Crowdsourcing) were recruited. Each of them received a reward of 2.5 dollars.
The survey contained 32 questions. The questions wererelated to the following: demographics, visual impairment,
use of the crowdsourcing platform, and accessibility problems.

ResultDemographics
These questions included those on age, gender, educationlevel, and working conditions.
80% (83.4% in the US, 77.1% in Japan) of the visually
impaired crowd workers at least have a university degree.
93.4% and 19.5% of the visually impaired crowd workers in the US and Japan, respectively, do not have regularjobs. More Japanese workers use crowdsourcing as a parttime job; American workers use it as the main job.

Visual impairment
These questions include those on the type of visual impairment, letters they can read, and use of screen readers.
The types of visual impairment are blindness, low vision,night blindness, hyperopia, light sensitivity, and color blindness.
There are six screen-reader users. The screen reader includes NVDA, PC-Talker, ChromeVox, Narrator, and Pericles.

Use of the crowdsourcing platform
These questions include those on the reasons why they chosea crowdsourcing platform and experience on crowdsourcing
platforms.
A total of 46.7% (56.7% in the US and 40.5% in Japan)of the visually impaired crowd workers took the survey.
The tasks that they perform also include social-media tasks,product criticism, data labeling, transcription, translation,testing, and article writing. Most of the Japanese crowd

workers only perform tasks such as taking surveys and writing articles.

Accessibility problems
These questions include those on the method of searchingfor accessibility tasks, problems that they overcome, function that they hope, and suggestions.
Approximately 10% (10% in US and 10% in Japan) of
the visually impaired crowd workers mentioned time as aproblem; they want more time to work or a reminder regarding the time left. Other problems include finding accessible
tasks and addressing technical issues.
They want functionalities such as time pausing, functionality expansion, screen-reader features, facilitation of understand the content, typo-error check, and task recommendations by AI.

Screen-reader usersThere were eight screen-reader users in the survey. Three ofthem only perform easy tasks; they choose tasks based on thepayment and current events. Two of them have time-related
problems, and two of them want the screen reader to support
web pages.

Discussion
In this study, the survey was conducted in English andJapanese on three crowdsourcing platforms. English users
performed more types of tasks than Japanese users did. Mostof the Japanese crowd workers only perform tasks suchas taking surveys and writing articles. In addition, someJapanese crowd workers want the typo error-check function.
This is related to language differences and the screen-reader
context. There are many homophones in the Japanese language. Braille and English letters have a one-to-one correspondence. However, braille and Japanese letters do not havea one-to-one correspondence. The voice of the screen reader
and the actual spelling of the text do not match.
The survey results suggests several ways we can support
visually impaired wokers with AI. For example, most tasks
are simple text-based tasks. More complex text tasks, such as
entity-matching tasks (Zhong et al. 2019), and more mediatype tasks, such as image tasks (Zhong et al. 2020), can beextended. Time is also a very important factor. Some visually impaired crowd workers mentioned time as a problem.
Reducing the working time is an important issue.

Conclusion
In this research, an online survey was conducted to investigate the current status of and problems encountered byvisually impaired workers when performing crowdsourcing
tasks.
The contributions of this study are as follows: The problems suffered by visually impaired people on three main
crowdsourcing platforms (in English and Japanese) wereidentified, and possible solutions to these problems were obtained.
In the future, this research can be extended to more crowdsourcing platforms and languages.

Acknowledgment
This work was partially supported by JST CREST Grant
Number JPMJCR16E3 and JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number
17K20022, Japan.

References
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