Accessible data visualization presentation tends to focus on single modality interfaces. In this work, we introduce ChartA11y, an app designed to provide both direct chart accessibility and comprehensive chart understanding by applying a two-mode setting: a semantic navigation framework mode and a direct touch mapping mode on mobile devices. We adapt existing accessible visualization frameworks to address the under-explored challenges posed by non-linear data distributions in scatter plots.
In this work, we focus on the design journey for creating these accessible touch experiences with two blind partners over 13 sessions. We identified difficulties in designing sensical interfaces for exploring 2-D visualizations where there is no strong spatial referent, and propose an co-designed implementation to enable users to explore such surfaces in a generalizable way. We couple this with incremental improvements to the ordering of information in narration design and sonification of relevant data attributes as the user is navigating the visualization.
This work will be presented at ASSETS 2024 by Jerry Zhang in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.