The visually impaired population faces significant challenges in daily activities. While prior works employ vision language models for assistance, most focus on static content and cannot address real-time perception needs in complex environments. Recent VideoLLMs enable real-time vision and speech interaction, offering promising potential for assistive tasks. In this work, we conduct the first study evaluating their effectiveness in supporting daily life for visually impaired individuals. We first conducted a user survey with visually impaired participants to design the benchmark VisAssistDaily for daily life evaluation. Using VisAssistDaily, we evaluate popular VideoLLMs and find GPT-4o achieves the highest task success rate. We further conduct a user study to reveal concerns about hazard perception. To address this, we propose SafeVid, an environment-awareness dataset, and fine-tune VITA-1.5, improving risk recognition accuracy from 25.00% to 76.00%.We hope this work provides valuable insights and inspiration for future research in this field.

In the study, the device of social robot was designed for visually impaired users, and along with a mobile application for provide functions to assist their lives. Both physical and mental conditions of visually impaired users are considered, and the mobile application provides functions: photo record, mood lift, greeting guest and today highlight. The application was designed for visually impaired users, and uses voice control to provide a friendly interface. Photo record function allows visually impaired users to capture image immediately when they encounter danger situations. Mood lift function accompanies visually impaired users by asking questions, playing music and reading articles. Greeting guest function answers to the visitors for the inconvenient physical condition of visually impaired users. In addition, today highlight function read news including weather forecast, daily horoscopes and daily reminder for visually impaired users. Multiple tools were adopted for developing the mobile application, and a website was developed for caregivers to check statues of visually impaired users and for marketing of the application.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse domains but often exhibit disparities in how they handle real-life queries. To systematically investigate these effects within various disability contexts, we introduce \textbf{AccessEval (Accessibility Evaluation)}, a benchmark evaluating 21 closed- and open-source LLMs across 6 real-world domains and 9 disability types using paired Neutral and Disability-Aware Queries. We evaluated model outputs with metrics for sentiment, social perception, and factual accuracy. Our analysis reveals that responses to disability-aware queries tend to have a more negative tone, increased stereotyping, and higher factual error compared to neutral queries. These effects show notable variation by domain and disability type, with disabilities affecting hearing, speech, and mobility disproportionately impacted. These disparities reflect persistent forms of ableism embedded in model behavior. By examining model performance in real-world decision-making contexts, we better illuminate how such biases can translate into tangible harms for disabled users. This framing helps bridges the gap between technical evaluation and user impact, reinforcing importance of bias mitigation in day-to-day applications. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Srikant86/AccessEval

People with visual impairments often face significant challenges in locating and retrieving objects in their surroundings. Existing assistive technologies present a trade-off: systems that offer precise guidance typically require pre-scanning or support only fixed object categories, while those with open-world object recognition lack spatial feedback for reaching the object. To address this gap, we introduce 'NaviSense', a mobile assistive system that combines conversational AI, vision-language models, augmented reality (AR), and LiDAR to support open-world object detection with real-time audio-haptic guidance. Users specify objects via natural language and receive continuous spatial feedback to navigate toward the target without needing prior setup. Designed with insights from a formative study and evaluated with 12 blind and low-vision participants, NaviSense significantly reduced object retrieval time and was preferred over existing tools, demonstrating the value of integrating open-world perception with precise, accessible guidance.

As machine learning systems increasingly inform critical decisions, the need for human-understandable explanations grows. Current evaluations of Explainable AI (XAI) often prioritize technical fidelity over cognitive accessibility which critically affects users, in particular those with visual impairments. We propose CUE, a model for Cognitive Understanding of Explanations, linking explanation properties to cognitive sub-processes: legibility (perception), readability (comprehension), and interpretability (interpretation). In a study (N=455) testing heatmaps with varying col-ormaps (BWR, Cividis, Coolwarm), we found comparable task performance but lower confidence/effort for visually impaired users. Unlike expected, these gaps were not mitigated and sometimes worsened by accessibility-focused color maps like Cividis. These results challenge assumptions about perceptual optimization and support the need for adaptive XAI interfaces. They also validate CUE by demonstrating that altering explanation legibility affects understandability. We contribute: (1) a formalized cognitive model for explanation understanding, (2) an integrated definition of human-centered explanation properties, and (3) empirical evidence motivating accessible, user-tailored XAI.

Abstract-- Numerous visual impairments can be detected in red-eye reflex images from young children. The so-called Bruckner test is traditionally performed by ophthalmologists in clinical settings. Thanks to the recent technological advances in smartphones and artificial intelligence, it is now possible to recreate the Bruckner test using a mobile device. In this paper, we present a first study conducted during the development of KidsVisionCheck, a free application that can perform vision screening with a mobile device using red-eye reflex images. The underlying model relies on deep neural networks trained on children's pupil images collected and labeled by an ophthalmologist. With an accuracy of 90% on unseen test data, our model provides highly reliable performance without the necessity of specialist equipment. Furthermore, we can identify the optimal conditions for data collection, which can in turn be used to provide immediate feedback to the users. In summary, this work marks a first step toward accessible pediatric vision screenings and early intervention for vision abnormalities worldwide.

Indoor built environments like homes and offices often present complex and cluttered layouts that pose significant challenges for individuals who are blind or visually impaired, especially when performing tasks that involve locating and gathering multiple objects. While many existing assistive technologies focus on basic navigation or obstacle avoidance, few systems provide scalable and efficient multi-object search capabilities in real-world, partially observable settings. To address this gap, we introduce OpenGuide, an assistive mobile robot system that combines natural language understanding with vision-language foundation models (VLM), frontier-based exploration, and a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) planner. OpenGuide interprets open-vocabulary requests, reasons about object-scene relationships, and adaptively navigates and localizes multiple target items in novel environments. Our approach enables robust recovery from missed detections through value decay and belief-space reasoning, resulting in more effective exploration and object localization. We validate OpenGuide in simulated and real-world experiments, demonstrating substantial improvements in task success rate and search efficiency over prior methods. This work establishes a foundation for scalable, human-centered robotic assistance in assisted living environments.

Shopping plays a significant role in shaping consumer identity and social integration. However, for individuals with visual impairments, navigating in supermarkets and identifying products can be an overwhelming and challenging experience. This paper presents an AI-based shopping assistant prototype designed to enhance the autonomy and inclusivity of visually impaired individuals in supermarket environments. The system integrates multiple technologies, including computer vision, speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and indoor navigation, into a single, user-friendly platform. Using cameras for ArUco marker detection and real-time environmental scanning, the system helps users navigate the store, identify product locations, provide real-time auditory guidance, and gain context about their surroundings. The assistant interacts with the user through voice commands and multimodal feedback, promoting a more dynamic and engaging shopping experience. The system was evaluated through experiments, which demonstrated its ability to guide users effectively and improve their shopping experience. This paper contributes to the development of inclusive AI-driven assistive technologies aimed at enhancing accessibility and user independence for the shopping experience.

Neural networks in assistive technology for visually impaired leverage artificial intelligence's capacity to recognize patterns in complex data. They are used for converting visual data into auditory or tactile representations, helping the visually impaired understand their surroundings. The primary aim of this research is to explore the potential of artificial neural networks to facilitate the differentiation of various forms of cash for individuals with visual impairments. In this study, we built a custom dataset of 3,468 images, which was subsequently used to train an SSD neural network model. The proposed system can accurately identify Nigerian cash, thereby streamlining commercial transactions. The performance of the system in terms of accuracy was assessed, and the Mean Average Precision score was over 90%. We believe that our system has the potential to make a substantial contribution to the field of assistive technology while also improving the quality of life of visually challenged persons in Nigeria and beyond.

Advances in vision language models (VLMs) have enabled the simulation of general human behavior through their reasoning and problem solving capabilities. However, prior research has not investigated such simulation capabilities in the accessibility domain. In this paper, we evaluate the extent to which VLMs can simulate the vision perception of low vision individuals when interpreting images. We first compile a benchmark dataset through a survey study with 40 low vision participants, collecting their brief and detailed vision information and both open-ended and multiple-choice image perception and recognition responses to up to 25 images. Using these responses, we construct prompts for VLMs (GPT - 4o) to create simulated agents of each participant, varying the included information on vision information and example image responses. We evaluate the agreement between VLM-generated responses and participants' original answers. Our results indicate that VLMs tend to infer beyond the specified vision ability when given minimal prompts, resulting in low agreement (0.59). The agreement between the agent' and participants' responses remains low when only either the vision information (0.59) or example image responses (0.59) are provided, whereas a combination of both significantly increase the agreement (0.70, p < 0.0001). Notably, a single example combining both open-ended and multiple-choice responses, offers significant performance improvements over either alone (p < 0.0001), while additional examples provided minimal benefits (p > 0.05).