{"doi":"10.1145/3563657.3596019","title":"Are Two Heads Better than One? Investigating Remote Sighted Assistance with Paired Volunteers","abstract":"Remote Sighted Assistance (RSA) is a popular smartphone-mediated aid for people with blindness, where a sighted individual converses with a blind individual in a one-on-one (1:1) session. Since sighted assistants outnumber blind individuals (13:1), this paper investigates what happens when more than one sighted individual assists a single blind individual in a session. Specifically, we propose paired-volunteer RSA, a new paradigm where two sighted volunteers assist a single user with blindness. We investigate the feasibility, desirability, and challenges of this paradigm and explore its opportunities. Our study with 8 sighted volunteers and 9 blind users reveals that the proposed paradigm extends the one-on-one RSA to cover a broader range of more intellectual and experiential tasks, providing new and distinctive opportunities in supporting complex, open-ended tasks (e.g., pursuing hobbies, appreciating arts, and seeking entertainment). These opportunities can not only enrich the blind users' quality of life and independence but also offer a fun and engaging experience for the sighted volunteers. The study also reveals the costs of extended collaboration in this paradigm. Finally, we synthesize a taxonomy of tasks where the proposed RSA paradigm can succeed and outline how HCI researchers and system designers can realize this paradigm.","journal":"PubMed","year":2023,"id":390159,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":13,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9568,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1161452,"name":"Rui Yu","orcid":"0000-0002-0946-6769","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1161453,"name":"Kaiming Cui","orcid":"0009-0001-8469-7807","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":983293,"name":"Sooyeon Lee","orcid":"0000-0002-4971-2004","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":983297,"name":"John M. Carroll","orcid":"0000-0001-5189-337X","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":983296,"name":"Syed Masum Billah","orcid":"0000-0001-5063-3808","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":983295,"name":"Jingyi Xie","orcid":"0000-0002-2753-2360","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":46,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:18:32.854511Z","pmid":"39760125","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}