Can you Read This? (Or: how I Improved Text Readability on the Web for the Visually Impaired)

The web is a visual amusement park, full of colorful images, playful gifs, and funny videos. But when that visual richness is combined with text, people with low vision or color blindness increasingly struggle with the basic function of reading and thus can’t fully enjoy what the web has to offer. In this talk, we will dive into the science of colors and how different people perceive them. We will discuss how color contrast affects text readability, and explain the challenge of estimating color contrast for text on complex background of an image or gradient. We will also explore how modern deep learning tools such as OCR and text detection can be used for text classification based on readability. In addition, I will share my personal experience of working with visual data while having a visual impairment.