Phetch is a game with a purpose intended to label images on the internet with descriptive captions suitable to assist sight impaired readers. Approximately 75% of the images on the web do not have proper ALT text labels, making them inaccessible through

screen readers A screen reader is a form of assistive technology (AT) that renders text and image content as speech or braille output. Screen readers are essential to blindness, blind people, and are useful to visually impaired people, Illiteracy, illiterate, ...

. The solution aimed at by Phetch is to label the images external to the web page rather than depending upon the web page author to create proper alt text for each image. Rather than paying people to do the mundane task of labeling images, Phetch aims to create a fun game that produces such descriptions as a side effect of having fun. Phetch was created by

Luis von Ahn Luis von Ahn (; born 19 August 1978) is a Guatemalan-American entrepreneur and software developer. He is the founder of the company reCAPTCHA, which was sold to Google in 2009, and the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo. For these projects and othe ...

and Shiry Ginosar of

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

following the pattern set by the earlier

ESP game The ESP game (''extrasensory perception game'') is a human-based computation game developed to address the problem of creating difficult metadata. The idea behind the game is to use the computational power of humans to perform a task that compute ...

. Phetch is played by three to five people. One is designated as a describer, while the rest are seekers. The describer is shown an image, which he describes to the seekers. The seekers use an Internet image search engine to attempt to find the image being described. The first seeker to find the image gains points and becomes the describer for the next round. The describer is also rewarded for a successful outcome. The data produced as the side effect of playing the game is the describer's descriptions of the image. An imagined system for serving these descriptions from a centralized server is described in the Phetch paper. The output of the game was later used to improve image search engines and the game itself was later proposed as a mechanism to test interactive search interfaces.Ginosar, Shiry:
Human Computation for HCIR Evaluation
, Proceedings, HCIR 2007, pp. 40-42. In late 2008, public access to Phetch was discontinued when the

was moved to the gwap.com domain. Peekaboom was also discontinued in late 2008.

Notes

{{reflist Guessing games Human-based computation games