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To broaden the participation of disabled students in STEM, we conducted an outreach program to inspire blind and low vision (BLV) students to pursue these disciplines in college, educate them and their Teachers of the Visually Impaired (TVIs) about accessibility in higher education, and begin to forge partnerships with local high schools. This experience report describes planning an accessible 80-person, half-day event. Pre- and post-survey evaluations showed that learning about accommodations and self-advocacy from BLV college students’ first-hand experiences was important for creating an inspirational STEM event. We also highlight how bringing together teachers from across the county and funding entities from across campus enabled us to bring greater visibility and sustainability to our initiative. 

In the last decade, there has been a surge in development and mainstream adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that can generate textual image descriptions from images. However, only a few of these, such as Microsoft’s SeeingAI, are specifically tailored to needs of people who are blind screen reader users, and none of these have been brought to bear on the particular challenges faced by parents who desire image descriptions of children’s picture books. Such images have distinct qualities, but there exists no research to explore the current state of the art and opportunities to improve image-to-text AI systems for this problem domain. We conducted a content analysis of the image descriptions generated for a sample of 20 images selected from 17 recently published children’s picture books, using five AI systems: asticaVision, BLIP, SeeingAI, TapTapSee, and VertexAI. We found that descriptions varied widely in their accuracy and completeness, with only 13% meeting both criteria. Overall, our findings suggest a need for AI image-to-text generation systems that are trained on the types, contents, styles, and layouts characteristic of children’s picture book images, towards increased accessibility for blind parents.