Accessibility for Color Vision Deficiencies: Challenges and Findings of a Large Scale Study on Paper Figures

Angerbauer, Katrin; Rodrigues, Nils; Cutura, Rene; Oney, Seyda; Pathmanathan, Nelusa; Morariu, Cristina; Weiskopf, Daniel; Sedlmair, Michael

doi:10.1145/3491102.3502133

Cited by 16 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…They also found that in instructions to authors, journals rarely mentioned the importance of designing figures for CVD accessibility. Angerbauer et al recruited crowdworkers to analyze a sample of 1,710 published images and to identify issues with the use of color 67 . On average, 60% of the sampled images were given a rating of "accessible" across CVD types.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying images in the biology literature that are problematic for people with a color-vision deficiency

Stevens,

Winegar,

Oakley

et al. 2023

Preprint

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To help maximize the impact of scientific journal articles, authors must ensure that article figures are accessible to people with color-vision deficiencies. Up to 8% of males and 0.5% of females experience a color-vision deficiency. For deuteranopia, the most common color-vision deficiency, we evaluated images published in biology-oriented research articles between 2012 and 2022. Out of 66,253 images, 56,816 (85.6%) included at least one color contrast that could be problematic for people with moderate-to-severe deuteranopia (“deuteranopes”). However, after informal evaluations, we concluded that spatial distances and within-image labels frequently mitigated potential problems. We systematically reviewed 4,964 images, comparing each against a simulated version that approximates how it appears to deuteranopes. We identified 636 (12.8%) images that would be difficult for deuteranopes to interpret. Although still prevalent, the frequency of this problem has decreased over time. Articles from cell-oriented biology subdisciplines were most likely to be problematic. We used machine-learning algorithms to automate the identification of problematic images. For a hold-out test set of 879 additional images, a convolutional neural network classified images with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.89. To enable others to apply this model, we created a Web application where users can upload images, view deuteranopia-simulated versions, and obtain predictions about whether the images are problematic. Such efforts are critical to ensuring the biology literature is interpretable to diverse audiences.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying images in the biology literature that are problematic for people with a color-vision deficiency

Stevens,

Winegar,

Oakley

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Each author coded papers individually and then discussed disagreements. The purpose of this initial study was not speciically to identify accessibility challenges in the papers as this is considered in previous work (e.g., [1,7,9,80]). The primary purpose was to identify the types and frequency of content elements in order to better inform the design of future tools and applications to support their development and inclusion in academic work.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The publication of academic work comprises many stages, from the conception of a research idea to a publication. An example timeline is shown in Figure 1 and can be summarised as (1) Planning; (2) Conducting, (3) Writing and (4) Publishing. Our timeline is not to be taken as deinitive, we acknowledge that at each stage we can expect some variation based on preferences and requirements of both authors and publishers, but we are highlighting a typical standard process.…”

Section: Publication Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Author Reflections on Creating Accessible Academic Papers

Menzies

Tigwell

Crabb

2022

ACM Trans. Access. Comput.

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Academic papers demonstrate inaccessibility despite accessible writing resources made available by SIGACCESS and others. The move from accessibility guidance to accessibility implementation is challenging for authors. Our work focuses on understanding what challenges authors of academic papers face in creating content elements (e.g., tables, charts, images) to better understand how to improve accessibility. We classified 3866 content elements from 330 papers covering a 10-year sample of academic work from ASSETS to understand the variety used. We also reflected on the design choices that make the content elements inaccessible. We then conducted interviews with 13 academic authors from PhD student through to Professor Emeritus that publish within top-tier accessibility and HCI venues to understand the challenges faced in creating accessible content. We found critical issues in how academics understand and implement accessibility while also balancing the visual design of the paper. We provide recommendations for improving accessibility in the academic paper writing process and focus on steps that can be taken by authors, publishers, researchers, and universities.

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“…A significant portion of visualizations employs color schemes that are difficult to interpret by individuals with color vision deficiency (CVD) [3]. This issue arises in part because balancing designer preferences with accessibility needs is challenging.…”

Section: Fostering Accessible Visualizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Color Maker: a Mixed-Initiative Approach to Creating Accessible Color Maps

Salvi,

Lu,

Papka

et al. 2024

Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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sequential diverging wave-style (CVD-safe) sequential (high hue variation) Figure 1: ColorMaker enables users to create and customize continuous colormaps in a variety of styles, including sequential, diverging, and 'wave'-style. Beyond optimizing for fundamental perceptual properties like uniformity, ColorMaker can also ideate and generate designs that are safe for individuals with color vision deficiency (CVD).

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Accessibility for Color Vision Deficiencies: Challenges and Findings of a Large Scale Study on Paper Figures

Cited by 16 publications

References 65 publications

Identifying images in the biology literature that are problematic for people with a color-vision deficiency

Identifying images in the biology literature that are problematic for people with a color-vision deficiency

Author Reflections on Creating Accessible Academic Papers

Color Maker: a Mixed-Initiative Approach to Creating Accessible Color Maps

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