SeeChart: Enabling Accessible Visualizations Through Interactive Natural Language Interface For People with Visual Impairments

Abstract

Web-based data visualizations have become very popular for exploring data and communicating insights. Newspapers, journals, and reports regularly publish visualizations to tell compelling stories with data. Unfortunately, most visualizations are inaccessible to readers with visual impairments. For many charts on the web, there are no accompanying alternative (alt) texts, and even if such texts exist they do not adequately describe important insights from charts. To address the problem, we first interviewed 15 blind users to understand their challenges and requirements for reading data visualizations. Based on the insights from these interviews, we developed SeeChart, an interactive tool that automatically deconstructs charts from web pages and then converts them to accessible visualizations for blind people by enabling them to hear the chart summary as well as to interact through data points using the keyboard. Our evaluation with 14 blind participants suggests the efficacy of SeeChart in understanding key insights from charts and fulfilling their information needs while reducing their required time and cognitive burden.

arXiv comment28 pages, 13 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Searching the Visual Style and Structure of D3 Visualizations
• Scatteract: Automated extraction of data from scatter plots
• Data Extraction from Charts via Single Deep Neural Network
• Chart-to-Text: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chart Summarization

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Chart4Blind: An Intelligent Interface for Chart Accessibility Conversion
• When Refreshable Tactile Displays Meet Conversational Agents: Investigating Accessible Data Presentation and Analysis with Touch and Speech
• ChartA11y: Designing Accessible Touch Experiences of Visualizations with Blind Smartphone Users
• TADA: Making Node-link Diagrams Accessible to Blind and Low-Vision People
• Plume: Scaffolding Text Composition in Dashboards
• Supporting Multimodal Data Interaction on Refreshable Tactile Displays: An Architecture to Combine Touch and Conversational AI
• Speech-based Mark for Data Sonification