Supporting Accessible Data Visualization Through Audio Data Narratives

Siu, Alexa F.; Kim, Gene S-H; O’Modhrain, Sile; Follmer, Sean

doi:10.1145/3491102.3517678

Cited by 29 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…We also learned a detailed set of challenges and considerations with numerous aspects of non-visual visual arts appreciation, centering on access modalities, visual concept comprehension, interpretation freedom, convenience, and social tensions. These considerations call to past work on multimodality (e.g., [22,70,78]), non-visual presentations of visual information (e.g., [77,112]), and social considerations of assistive technologies (e.g., [76,80,110]), but specifically provide guidance for visual arts presentations. In particular, these findings provide novel insights on what blind patrons want to learn about specific elements of visual arts (e.g., form, shape, or content), which of them should be presented in what modalities (e.g., haptics, audio, level of interactivity) (Section 6.1), persisting challenges with these modalities, and what types of social and interpretation goals are involved (Section 4).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Visual Arts Experiences of Blind People

Li,

Zhang,

Bandukda

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Visual arts play an important role in cultural life and provide access to social heritage and self-enrichment, but most visual arts are inaccessible to blind people. Researchers have explored different ways to enhance blind people's access to visual arts (e.g., audio descriptions, tactile graphics). However, how blind people adopt these methods remains unknown. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 blind visual arts patrons to understand how they engage with visual artwork and the factors that influence their adoption of visual arts access methods. We further examined interview insights in a follow-up survey (N=220). We present: 1) current practices and challenges of accessing visual artwork in-person and online (e.g., Zoom tour), 2) motivation and cognition of perceiving visual arts (e.g., imagination), and 3) implications for designing visual arts access methods. Overall, our findings provide a roadmap for technology-based support for blind people's visual arts experiences.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in accessibility.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Visual Arts Experiences of Blind People

Li,

Zhang,

Bandukda

et al. 2023

Preprint

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“…We demonstrate Erie's expressiveness by replicating accessibility and general-purpose sonification designs proposed by prior work (e.g., Audio Narrative [45], Chart Reader [47], and news articles [12]). We provide an interactive gallery with a variety of example sonification designs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…iGraph-Lite [21] provides keyboard interaction for reading line charts, and Chart Reader [47] extends this approach to other position-based charts and supports author-specified "data insights" that highlight certain parts of a given visualization and read out text-based insight descriptions. Siu et al [45] propose an automated method for splitting a line chart into several sequences and adding a template-based alternative text to each sequence. Agarwal et al [4] provide a touch-based interaction method for browsing data sonifications on mobile phones.…”

Section: Sonification Tools and Toolkitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Erie: A Declarative Grammar for Data Sonification

Kim,

Hullman

2024

Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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Data sonification-mapping data variables to auditory variables, such as pitch or volume-is used for data accessibility, scientific exploration, and data-driven art (e.g., museum exhibitions) among others. While a substantial amount of research has been made on effective and intuitive sonification design, software support is not commensurate, limiting researchers from fully exploring its capabilities. We contribute Erie, a declarative grammar for data sonification, that enables abstractly expressing auditory mappings. Erie supports specifying extensible tone designs (e.g., periodic wave, sampling, frequency/amplitude modulation synthesizers), various encoding channels, auditory legends, and composition options like sequencing and overlaying. Using standard Web Audio and Web Speech APIs, we provide an Erie compiler for web environments. We demonstrate the expressiveness and feasibility of Erie by replicating research prototypes presented by prior work and provide a sonification design gallery. We discuss future steps to extend Erie toward other audio computing environments and support interactive data sonification. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Accessibility systems and tools.

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“…For example, SAS [6] uses sonification with keyboard navigation where the values of each bar are represented by the pitch of the corresponding piano note. Sio et al [74] proposed a heuristics-based approach combining sonification with textual description to generate audio data narratives from a time-series dataset and Infosonics [39] presented an unconventional method to present the audio analogue of infographics combining interactive sonifications, spoken introduction, and harmonious notes. Wang et al [81] conducted experiments to find how different auditory channels affect the perception of visualization among people with visual impairments and they reported that pitch was the most instinctive channel to understand all data types (e.g., quantitative, ordinal, and nominal).…”

Section: Accessible Visualizationmentioning

confidence: 99%