Chart Reader: Accessible Visualization Experiences Designed with Screen Reader Users

Umwelt: Accessible Structured Editing of Multi-Modal Data Representations

“…Similarly, research systems have explored methods for combining tactile graphics with voice [3,4], sonification with voice [19], haptics and sonification [15], and sonification and interactive questionanswering. Among such multimodal systems, Chart Reader [37] is a particularly apt point of comparison to our work because, like Umwelt, it incorporates best practices in visualization, structured textual description, and sonification into a single analysis interface.…”

“…In contrast to prior approaches, such as Chart Reader [37], that were constrained to a small set of chart forms (and therefore keyvalue semantics), Umwelt can express more complex relationships among fields. For instance, Figure 7.B shows a dataset with an empty key and a set of values with two quantitative fields and one nominal field, visually represented as scatterplot.…”

“…Unfortunately, existing tools for creating multimodal data representations center the visual modality: they assume the existence of a visualization that can then be converted into an accessible representation. For instance, Chart Reader [37] and VoxLens [33] derive textual and sonified representations from an input specification of a visualization, while the SAS Graphics Accelerator [1] and Highcharts Sonification Studio [9] provide editors for non-visual representations that require users to first specify a visualization. This ordering imposes limitations on both the authoring process and the expressivity of the output representations.…”