Evaluating a tool for improving accessibility to charts and graphs

Abstract

We discuss factors in the design and evaluation of natural language-driven assistive technologies that generate descriptions of, and allow interaction with, graphical representations of numerical data. In particular, we provide data in favor of 1) screen-reading technologies as a usable, useful, and cost-effective means of interacting with graphs. The data also show that by carrying out evaluation of Assistive Technologies on populations other than the target communities, certain subtleties of navigation and interaction may be lost or distorted.

Mobile assistive technologies for the visually impaired

“…Information accessibility for the visually impaired has been enhanced generally by the development of tactile-and auditorybased presentation methods as effective alternatives to traditional visual presentation of information 3,71,2 . These alternative modalities for information access are, for example, applicable to websites e.g., 26,67 , charts and graphs e.g., 36,35 , and facial expressions e.g., 10 . In isolation, however, these solutions do not constitute mobile assistive technologies and so, while important and interesting, they are outside the scope of this review.…”

Accessible On-Line Floor Plans

“…This has focussed on automatically generating a textual summary or audio presentation of on-line bar charts (Interactive SIGHT) [6] and (iGraph-LITE) line graphs [7]. Our work differs from this because of its focus on floor plans rather than bar or line charts and because we generate a simplified spatial representation as well as a textual summary.…”

“…Our approach is in contrast to research on producing accessible versions of on-line bar charts and line graphs which has focused on producing a textual description of the online graphic [6,7]. While a textual description can provide an overview of the building's layout, such a description necessarily loses information and it is also difficult to use it to build a mental model of the layout.…”

Multimodal Presentation of Two-Dimensional Charts

“…The work has, so far, concentrated on the analysis of bar charts, with strong potential for future developments. Ferres et al [2007Ferres et al [ , 2010 developed a system that provides a textual descriptions of charts, called iGRAPH-Lite. Building on existing research on data-totext generation (e.g., Reiter and Dale [2000]; Yu et al [2007]), iGRAPH-Lite combines generation of simple summaries with the ability of retrieve and access all the information about a chart through the use of a keyboard interface (in a style similar to that of screen readers) including access to the point-level information of the data plotted in the chart.…”

“…Textual summarization techniques (e.g., Demir et al [2008]; Elzer et al [2003]; Ferres et al [2007]) provide an interesting alternative, applying statistical and natural language processing techniques to generate speech description of graphs. These systems provide also question-answering capabilities (e.g., Demir et al [2010aDemir et al [ , 2010b; Ferres et al [2010]), that can offer a level of user customization of the presentation of the graph (e.g., further expanding the content of the summary [Demir et al 2010a] or accessing the point-level information of the graph [Ferres et al 2010]). Nevertheless, the presentation models provided in these studies have been, to date, limited to relatively simple types of charts (e.g., simple bar charts) due to the need of relying on image processing technologies to extract communicative signals from charts and do not recognize task-dependent access modalities in the development of the presentation.…”