Representational and Productivity Tools
We investigate how blind people use data visualisations, diagrams, mind maps, mathematical expressions, code editors, to-do lists, calendars, or budgeting software for making sense of datasets and cognitive off-loading during complex tasks.
Publications
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Accessible text descriptions for UpSet plots
DOI: 10.1109/AccessViz64636.2024.00005 · Publisher · PDF · Accessible HTML
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Using tactile charts to support comprehension and learning of complex visualizations for blind and low vision individuals
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Semantic scaffolding: Augmenting textual structures with domain-specific groupings for accessible data exploration (Preprint)
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2506.15883 · Publisher · PDF · Accessible HTML
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Benthic: Perceptually congruent structures for accessible charts and diagrams
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Umwelt: Accessible structured editing of multi-modal data representations
DOI: 10.1145/3613904.3641996 · Publisher · PDF · Accessible HTML
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“Customization is key”: Reconfigurable content tokens for accessible data visualizations
DOI: 10.1145/3613904.3641970 · Publisher · PDF · Accessible HTML
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Rich screen reader experiences for accessible data visualization
Media
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From Touch to Insight: Teaching Complex Charts with Tactile Models
We asked ourselves whether tactile charts can help blind or partially sighted people learn to understand more complex visualizations. While most accessibility work has focused on simple bar or line charts, professional and scientific contexts often rely on more advanced forms such as UpSet plots, clustered heatmaps, violin plots, and faceted line charts. To address this gap, we worked closely with colleagues at the Visualization Design Lab, University of Utah, to design 3D-printed tactile template charts and accompanying exploration instructions for these chart types.
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Benthic: Making Diagrams Make Sense Through Screen Readers
Charts and diagrams aren’t just pictures—they’re structures. Boxes contain other boxes; arrows connect ideas; groups form wholes. Sighted readers pick up these relationships at a glance. Screen reader users, meanwhile, are too often given a flat wall of alt text.
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Helping Blind Readers of charts Make Sense of Data with a Semantic Scaffold of Domain Knowledge
When you open a dataset for the first time, the numbers rarely speak for themselves. You might see patterns in a chart but not know what they mean — or you might have an idea in mind (“sports cars”) but struggle to translate it into the dataset’s fields. For blind and low-vision screen reader users, this challenge is even sharper, since interfaces rarely provide the kind of overview that sighted readers get at a glance.
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Making Complex Charts Accessible: Text Descriptions for UpSet Plots
Not all charts are created equal when it comes to accessibility. Some, like line or bar charts, lend themselves to concise descriptions. Others, like UpSet plots—used widely in science to show how sets overlap—are much harder to explain. UpSet has become a staple in fields like genomics, but for blind and low-vision readers, the lack of accessible descriptions is a major barrier.
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Umwelt: Experiencing the World Through Multiple Senses
Much of accessibility research in data visualisation has focused on “making the visual accessible” — translating a chart into text or sound after the fact. With Umwelt, our new system presented at CHI 2024, we take a different approach: treating visualisation, sonification, and structured text as coequal ways of representing data.
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Customisable Textual Descriptions for Screen Reader Accessible Visualisations
In our EuroVis 2022 paper, we mapped the design space of screen reader accessible data visualisations, showing how structure, navigation, and description can extend accessibility beyond alt text and data tables. This new study, carried out in collaboration with the MIT Visualisation Group, who also maintain the Olli open source library, takes the next step—making textual descriptions themselves customisable.
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Screen Reader Accessible Data Visualisations: Beyond Alt Text and Data Tables
Alt text and data tables are the default fallback when making visualisations accessible—but they only scratch the surface. In collaboration with the MIT Visualisation Group, and drawing on my lived experience as a blind researcher, we set out to explore how data visualisations can be meaningfully navigated and understood through screen readers.
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Customizing Descriptions of Data Visualisations
This podcast episode will discuss why customization is crucial for making data visualizations accessible to blind and partially sighted people, who have widely-varying needs. You'll learn about four key design goals for accessible visualizations: presence, verbosity, ordering, and duration; and how modeling content as reconfigurable tokens can achieve these goals. Discover how this approach, implemented in tools like Olli, increases the ease of identifying and remembering information for blind individuals, despite introducing some complexity.
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Rethinking Data Visualization for Rich Screen Reader Experiences
Tune in to discover why current web accessibility guidelines often fall short for blind and partially sighted people trying to interact with data visualisations. We'll explore a new approach that introduces three key design dimensions: structure, navigation, and description, to create rich screen reader experiences. Learn how these designs help users conceptualise data spatially, selectively attend to data of interest, and gain control over their data analysis process.
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Diagram exploration with screen readers
Discover Benthic, a groundbreaking system revolutionising how blind and partially sighted people interact with charts and diagrams. This podcast will explain how Benthic uses hypergraphs to unify hierarchical and adjacent visual relationships into a perceptually congruent screen reader interface. Tune in to learn how this innovation enables fluid and domain agnostic navigation for complex graphical representations, fostering a deeper understanding of visual information for blind readers.
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Dial a domain expert: Scaffolding your data exploration
Tune in to discover semantic scaffolding, an innovative technique that uses AI to make complex data more understandable by connecting interesting data patterns to their real-world meaning. We'll explore how this approach helps lay readers and those with visual impairments to quickly grasp the context of new datasets, making data exploration more accessible and insightful.
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No more tyranny for visual representations
Tune in to learn about Umwelt, a groundbreaking authoring environment designed for blind and partially sighted individuals and their sighted collaborators to independently create and explore multimodal data representations. We'll discuss how it de-centers traditional visual-first approaches, treating visualization, sonification, and textual descriptions as co-equal ways to understand data, and how this enables complementary overview and detailed perspectives for analysis.
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Tactile charts for building mental models of complex data representations
Tune in to discover how tactile charts are transforming how blind and partially sighted learners get familiar with chart types unknown to them. This overview explores innovative 3D-printed designs for complex data visualisations and reveals how these hands-on tools significantly improve understanding and learning, addressing a crucial accessibility gap. You'll gain insights into the design process and the profound impact of tactile models on inclusive education.
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Textual descriptions for upset plots
Discover how we are tackling the challenge of making complex data visualizations, like the widely used UpSet plots, accessible to blind and partially sighted people. This episode will explain innovative methods for automatically generating comprehensive text descriptions that effectively convey the intricate patterns and insights found in these scientific charts.
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Rich Screen Reader Experiences for Accessible Data Visualization
This pre-recorded conference talk introduces the design space relevant to rich screen reader experiences, during the interaction with data visualisations embedded in web content.
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“Customization is Key”: Reconfigurable Textual Tokens for Accessible Data Visualizations
This pre-recorded conference talk introduces how reconfigurable text-to-speech description tokens enable screen reader users to customise their reading experience during data exploration. .