Fig. 1. An example interactive visualization designed in Lyra 2, a visualization design environment. Users can (a) brush in the scatterplot to re-aggregate the histogram, and (b) click histogram bars to filter for corresponding points in the scatterplot. This visualization was designed by demonstration -users did not have to write any textual code.
Current web accessibility guidelines ask visualization designers to support screen readers via basic non‐visual alternatives like textual descriptions and access to raw data tables. But charts do more than summarize data or reproduce tables; they afford interactive data exploration at varying levels of granularity—from fine‐grained datum‐by‐datum reading to skimming and surfacing high‐level trends. In response to the lack of comparable non‐visual affordances, we present a set of rich screen reader experiences for accessible data visualization and exploration. Through an iterative co‐design process, we identify three key design dimensions for expressive screen reader accessibility: structure, or how chart entities should be organized for a screen reader to traverse; navigation, or the structural, spatial, and targeted operations a user might perform to step through the structure; and, description, or the semantic content, composition, and verbosity of the screen reader's narration. We operationalize these dimensions to prototype screen‐reader‐accessible visualizations that cover a diverse range of chart types and combinations of our design dimensions. We evaluate a subset of these prototypes in a mixed‐methods study with 13 blind and visually impaired readers. Our findings demonstrate that these designs help users conceptualize data spatially, selectively attend to data of interest at different levels of granularity, and experience control and agency over their data analysis process. An accessible HTML version of this paper is available at: http://vis.csail.mit.edu/pubs/rich-screen-reader-vis-experiences.
Establishing common ground and maintaining shared awareness amongst participants is a key challenge in collaborative visualization. For real-time collaboration, existing work has primarily focused on synchronizing constituent visualizations -an approach that makes it difficult for users to work independently, or selectively attend to their collaborators' activity. To address this gap, we introduce a design space for representing synchronous multi-user collaboration in visualizations defined by two orthogonal axes: situatedness, or whether collaborators' interactions are overlaid on or shown outside of a user's view, and specificity, or whether collaborators are depicted through abstract, generic representations or through specific means customized for the given visualization. We populate this design space with a variety of examples including generic and custom synchronized cursors, and user legends that collect these cursors together or reproduce collaborators' views as thumbnails. To build common ground, users can interact with these representations by peeking to take a quick look at a collaborator's view, tracking to follow along with a collaborator in real-time, and forking to independently explore the visualization based on a collaborator's work. We present a reference implementation of a wrapper library that converts interactive Vega-Lite charts into collaborative visualizations. We find that our approach affords synchronous collaboration across an expressive range of visual designs and interaction techniques.
The lack of consent or debriefing in online research has attracted widespread public distrust. How can designers create systems to earn and maintain public trust in large-scale online research? Procedural theories inform processes that enable individuals to make decisions about their participation. Substantive theories focus on the normative judgments that researchers and participants make about specific studies in context. Informed by these theories, we designed Bartleby, a system for debriefing participants and eliciting their views about studies that involved them. We evaluated this system by using it to debrief thousands of participants in a series of observational and experimental studies on Twitter and Reddit. We find that Bartleby addresses procedural concerns by creating new opportunities for study participants to exercise autonomy. We also find that participants use Bartleby to contribute to substantive, value-driven conversations about participant voice and power. We conclude with a critical reflection on the strengths and limitations of reusable software to satisfy values from both procedural and substantive ethical theories.
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