VisAssist: A Visually Impaired-Captured Video Question Answering Benchmark for Assistive Systems

Abstract

We present VisAssist, the first large-scale video question-answering dataset with 13,413 real-world videos captured by visually impaired users, addressing a critical gap in assistive vision research. Unlike existing benchmarks relying on third-person footage, VisAssist provides authentic first-person perspectives that uniquely capture challenges in blind photography—including unconventional framing, motion artifacts, and frequent information omission. Benchmark evaluations of SOTA multimodal models reveal systematic limitations: severe deficiencies in spatial reasoning when processing dynamic first-person viewpoints, an inability to distinguish missing information from poor capture quality leading to hazardous hallucinations, and fragile text understanding especially for non-Latin scripts under suboptimal conditions. This work establishes a vital real-world benchmark and underscores the need for specialized architectures in visual assistance systems.