Shruti Singh Baghel


2025

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Towards Blind and Low-Vision Accessibility of Lightweight VLMs and Custom LLM-Evals
Shruti Singh Baghel | Yash Pratap Singh Rathore | Anurag Pradhan | Sushovan Jena | Arnav Bhavsar | Amit Shukla | Pawan Goyal
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Multimodal Models for Low-Resource Contexts and Social Impact (MMLoSo 2025)

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at understanding and generating video descriptions but their high memory, computation, and deployment demands hinder practical use particularly for blind and low-vision (BLV) users who depend on detailed, context-aware descriptions. To study the effect of model size on accessibility-focused description quality, we evaluate SmolVLM2 variants with 500M and 2.2B parameters across two diverse datasets: AVCaps (outdoor), and Charades (indoor). In this work, we introduce two novel evaluation frameworks specifically designed for BLV accessibility assessment: the Multi-Context BLV Framework evaluating spatial orientation, social interaction, action events, and ambience contexts; and the Navigational Assistance Framework focusing on mobility-critical information. Additionally, we conduct a systematic evaluation of four different prompt design strategies and deploy both models on a smartphone, evaluating FP32 and INT8 precision variants to assess real-world performance constraints on resource-limited mobile devices.