AVA: Accessibility, Vision and Autonomy Meet

The goal of this workshop is to gather researchers, students, and advocates who work at the intersection of accessibility, computer vision, and autonomous and intelligent systems. In particular, we plan to use the workshop to identify challenges and pursue solutions for the current lack of shared and principled development tools for vision-based accessibility systems. For instance, there is a general lack of vision-based benchmarks and methods relevant to accessibility (e.g., people using mobility aids are currently mostly absent from large-scale datasets in pedestrian detection). Towards building a community of accessibility-oriented research in computer vision conferences, we also introduce a large-scale fine-grained computer vision challenge. The challenge involves visual recognition tasks relevant to individuals with disabilities. We aim to use the challenge to uncover research opportunities and spark the interest of computer vision and AI researchers working on more robust and broadly usable visual reasoning models in the future. An interdisciplinary panel of speakers will further provide an opportunity for fostering a mutual discussion between accessibility, computer vision, and robotics researchers and practitioners.