SeeChart: Enabling Accessible Visualizations Through Interactive Natural Language Interface For People with Visual Impairments

TL;DR

SeeChart is an interactive tool that makes web-based data visualizations accessible to blind users by converting charts into auditory summaries and enabling data point interaction, thus improving understanding and accessibility.

Contribution

The paper introduces SeeChart, a novel interactive system that automatically deconstructs and converts web charts into accessible auditory visualizations for blind users.

Findings

Blind users understood key insights more effectively with SeeChart.

SeeChart reduced time and cognitive effort for blind users to interpret charts.

Participants found SeeChart improved accessibility and user experience.

Abstract

Web-based data visualizations have become very popular for exploring data and communicating insights. Newspapers, journals, and reports regularly publish visualizations to tell compelling stories with data. Unfortunately, most visualizations are inaccessible to readers with visual impairments. For many charts on the web, there are no accompanying alternative (alt) texts, and even if such texts exist they do not adequately describe important insights from charts. To address the problem, we first interviewed 15 blind users to understand their challenges and requirements for reading data visualizations. Based on the insights from these interviews, we developed SeeChart, an interactive tool that automatically deconstructs charts from web pages and then converts them to accessible visualizations for blind people by enabling them to hear the chart summary as well as to interact through data points using the keyboard. Our evaluation with 14 blind participants suggests the efficacy of SeeChart in understanding key insights from charts and fulfilling their information needs while reducing their required time and cognitive burden.