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ChartA11y: Designing Accessible Touch Experiences of Visualizations with Blind Smartphone Users

Zhuohao Jerry Zhang, John R. Thompson, Aditi Shah, Manish Agrawal, Alper Sarikaya, Jacob O. Wobbrock, Edward Cutrell, Bongshin Lee

TL;DR

This work introduces ChartA11y, an app developed to enable accessible 2-D visualizations on smartphones for blind users through a participatory and iterative design process involving 13 sessions with two blind partners, offering a novel approach for blind users to access visualizations on their smartphones.

Abstract

We introduce ChartA11y, an app developed to enable accessible 2-D visualizations on smartphones for blind users through a participatory and iterative design process involving 13 sessions with two blind partners. We also present a design journey for making accessible touch experiences that go beyond simple auditory feedback, incorporating multimodal interactions and multisensory data representations. Together, ChartA11y aimed at providing direct chart accessing and comprehensive chart understanding by applying a two-mode setting: a semantic navigation framework mode and a direct touch mapping mode. By re-designing traditional touch-to-audio interactions, ChartA11y also extends to accessible scatter plots, addressing the under-explored challenges posed by their non-linear data distribution. Our main contributions encompass the detailed participatory design process and the resulting system, ChartA11y, offering a novel approach for blind users to access visualizations on their smartphones.

ChartA11y: Designing Accessible Touch Experiences of Visualizations with Blind Smartphone Users

TL;DR

This work introduces ChartA11y, an app developed to enable accessible 2-D visualizations on smartphones for blind users through a participatory and iterative design process involving 13 sessions with two blind partners, offering a novel approach for blind users to access visualizations on their smartphones.

Abstract

We introduce ChartA11y, an app developed to enable accessible 2-D visualizations on smartphones for blind users through a participatory and iterative design process involving 13 sessions with two blind partners. We also present a design journey for making accessible touch experiences that go beyond simple auditory feedback, incorporating multimodal interactions and multisensory data representations. Together, ChartA11y aimed at providing direct chart accessing and comprehensive chart understanding by applying a two-mode setting: a semantic navigation framework mode and a direct touch mapping mode. By re-designing traditional touch-to-audio interactions, ChartA11y also extends to accessible scatter plots, addressing the under-explored challenges posed by their non-linear data distribution. Our main contributions encompass the detailed participatory design process and the resulting system, ChartA11y, offering a novel approach for blind users to access visualizations on their smartphones.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 44 sections, 8 figures, 1 algorithm.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Accessible Visualization Experiences
  4. Multisensory Data Representation and Multimodal Interactions
  5. Participatory Design Method
  6. ChartA11y Prototype
  7. ChartA11y Overview
  8. ChartA11y Interactions
  9. Semantic Navigation Framework (SNF)
  10. Fundamental Interaction Logic
  11. VoiceOver Touch and Gesture
  12. Series Switching Rotor
  13. Sonification Toggle Rotor
  14. Sonification and Encodings
  15. Accessible Narration Design
  16. ...and 29 more sections

Figures (8)

  • Figure 1: The design of the Semantic Navigation Framework mode, including (a) the original chart rendered on a web page, (b) the starting point of how blind users open charts in ChartA11y, and (c-f) the example scenes of using SNF mode.
  • Figure 2: The design of touch and gestures in the Semantic Navigation Framework, with most similar to VoiceOver's gestures to give users a similar navigation experience.
  • Figure 3: The design of auditory feedback in Semantic Navigation Framework mode, including two examples of feedback in line charts and scatter plots.
  • Figure 4: An example of accessible narration design in scatter plots, including the bin, series, and cell levels.
  • Figure 5: The design of Direct Touch Mapping mode, including different features to enable BLVIs to directly and effortlessly access visual elements in chart.
  • ...and 3 more figures