Understanding Data Accessibility for People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Professional Differences: A Comparative Study of Visualization Task Performance and Spatial Ability Across Disciplines

“…While separating the discipline and data from the user simplifies design, prior studies have shown that reality is more complex: individuals have different cognitive abilities and those abilities inform visualization use [59,72,77]. Educators have explored in detail the relationships between cognitive abilities, educational path, and profession [61,75,76,82].…”

ComputableViz: Mathematical Operators as a Formalism for Visualization Processing and Analysis

“…Many existing visualizations are inaccessible, and researchers recently started calling for scalable and affordable approaches that automatically convert charts into accessible designs [34]. For example, Wu et al [93] suggested that the commonly used line charts (Figure 7 (A)) are not accessible for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, while a dot-based plot is a better alternative (Figure 7 (B)). One possible solution to the above problem is style transfer, i.e., to blend the data of the original visualization (visualization A) with the visual encodings of another (visualization B).…”

Visualization for Villainy

“…The recent trend towards designing accessible visualizations [45,80] in fact provides a wide palette of inspiration for making visualizations unusable for those we wish to exclude. Elavsky's Chartability [30], a toolkit for designing inclusive data visualizations, provides a checklist of possible failure points that might be capitalized upon.…”

“…Color blindness more significantly affects white men, and we may be able to leverage this to focus on it to the exclusion of all other accessibility issues, thus reinforcing the dominant power structure and pulling resources away from others. Wu et al [80] highlight that people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities may be preyed upon by using unfamiliar and complex visual forms. Marriott et al [53] note that people with motor disabilities can be excluded from data experiences by providing controls that are not adapted to them.…”

“…We believe this is a critical juncture to carry out this sinister work. Recent efforts to use visualization for social good [1, 3, 4] and the emerging thread of research focused on the ethical issues facing data visualization practitioners [21,29,67] suggest a growing interest in using visualization for the benefit of marginalized people [26,61], disabled people [45,50,53,80], and people in general. We therefore hold that there is an urgent need to intervene now and provide countermeasures to these do-gooder efforts.…”