Are Large Vision-Language Models Ready to Guide Blind and Low-Vision Individuals?

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Main Authors: Kim, Eunki, An, Na Min, Kang, Wan Ju, Kim, Sangryul, Thorne, James, Shim, Hyunjung
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kim, Eunki
An, Na Min
Kang, Wan Ju
Kim, Sangryul
Thorne, James
Shim, Hyunjung
author_facet Kim, Eunki
An, Na Min
Kang, Wan Ju
Kim, Sangryul
Thorne, James
Shim, Hyunjung
contents Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate a promising direction for assisting individuals with blindness or low-vision (BLV). Yet, measuring their true utility in real-world scenarios is challenging because evaluating whether their descriptions are BLV-informative requires a fundamentally different approach from assessing standard scene descriptions. While the "VLM-as-a-metric" or "LVLM-as-a-judge" paradigm has emerged, existing evaluators still fall short of capturing the unique requirements of BLV-centric evaluation, lacking at least one of the following key properties: (1) High correlation with human judgments, (2) Long instruction understanding, (3) Score generation efficiency, and (4) Multi-dimensional assessment. To this end, we propose a unified framework to bridge the gap between automated evaluation and actual BLV needs. First, we conduct an in-depth user study with BLV participants to understand and quantify their navigational preferences, curating VL-GUIDEDATA, a large-scale BLV user-simulated preference dataset containing image-request-response-score pairs. We then leverage the dataset to develop an accessibility-aware evaluator, VL-GUIDE-S, which outperforms existing (L)VLM judges in both human alignment and inference efficiency. Notably, its effectiveness extends beyond a single domain, demonstrating strong performance across multiple fine-grained, BLV-critical dimensions. We hope our work lays as a foundation for automatic AI judges that advance safe, barrier-free navigation for BLV users.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_00766
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Are Large Vision-Language Models Ready to Guide Blind and Low-Vision Individuals?
Kim, Eunki
An, Na Min
Kang, Wan Ju
Kim, Sangryul
Thorne, James
Shim, Hyunjung
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate a promising direction for assisting individuals with blindness or low-vision (BLV). Yet, measuring their true utility in real-world scenarios is challenging because evaluating whether their descriptions are BLV-informative requires a fundamentally different approach from assessing standard scene descriptions. While the "VLM-as-a-metric" or "LVLM-as-a-judge" paradigm has emerged, existing evaluators still fall short of capturing the unique requirements of BLV-centric evaluation, lacking at least one of the following key properties: (1) High correlation with human judgments, (2) Long instruction understanding, (3) Score generation efficiency, and (4) Multi-dimensional assessment. To this end, we propose a unified framework to bridge the gap between automated evaluation and actual BLV needs. First, we conduct an in-depth user study with BLV participants to understand and quantify their navigational preferences, curating VL-GUIDEDATA, a large-scale BLV user-simulated preference dataset containing image-request-response-score pairs. We then leverage the dataset to develop an accessibility-aware evaluator, VL-GUIDE-S, which outperforms existing (L)VLM judges in both human alignment and inference efficiency. Notably, its effectiveness extends beyond a single domain, demonstrating strong performance across multiple fine-grained, BLV-critical dimensions. We hope our work lays as a foundation for automatic AI judges that advance safe, barrier-free navigation for BLV users.
title Are Large Vision-Language Models Ready to Guide Blind and Low-Vision Individuals?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00766