Designing Born-Accessible Courses in Data Science and Visualization: Challenges and Opportunities of a Remote Curriculum Taught by Blind Instructors to Blind Students

TL;DR

This study investigates how to design and deliver a remote data science and visualization course tailored for blind students, taught by blind instructors. It describes a four-session, two-week curriculum using R, VSCode, and MAIDR to enable non-visual data exploration, with tactile graphics and multimodal representations. Quantitative results show significant gains in confidence for creating key visualizations, complemented by qualitative insights into the practical challenges of audio-based learning and environment setup, as well as perceived improvements in data literacy. The work demonstrates the viability of an accessible, instructor-led online program for BLV learners and offers actionable guidance for scaling and refining remote, inclusive data science education.

Abstract

While recent years have seen a growing interest in accessible visualization tools and techniques for blind people, little attention is paid to the learning opportunities and teaching strategies of data science and visualization tailored for blind individuals. Whereas the former focuses on the accessibility issues of data visualization tools, the latter is concerned with the learnability of concepts and skills for data science and visualization. In this paper, we present novel approaches to teaching data science and visualization to blind students in an online setting. Taught by blind instructors, nine blind learners having a wide range of professional backgrounds participated in a two-week summer course. We describe the course design, teaching strategies, and learning outcomes. We also discuss the challenges and opportunities of teaching data science and visualization to blind students. Our work contributes to the growing body of knowledge on accessible data science and visualization education, and provides insights into the design of online courses for blind students.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Tactile graphics in swell paper shared with participants: (A) scatter plot, (B) box plot, (C) bar plot, and (D) heatmap.