ChartA11y: Designing Accessible Touch Experiences of Visualizations with Blind Smartphone Users

TL;DR

ChartA11y is a novel smartphone app that enables blind users to access and understand 2-D visualizations through multimodal, participatory design, addressing challenges in touch interactions and complex data representations.

Contribution

It introduces a participatory design process and a new accessible visualization system that enhances touch interactions and comprehension for blind smartphone users.

Findings

Successful development of ChartA11y through iterative design sessions.

Enhanced accessibility for scatter plots with non-linear data.

Improved multimodal interaction methods for visual data understanding.

Abstract

We introduce ChartA11y, an app developed to enable accessible 2-D visualizations on smartphones for blind users through a participatory and iterative design process involving 13 sessions with two blind partners. We also present a design journey for making accessible touch experiences that go beyond simple auditory feedback, incorporating multimodal interactions and multisensory data representations. Together, ChartA11y aimed at providing direct chart accessing and comprehensive chart understanding by applying a two-mode setting: a semantic navigation framework mode and a direct touch mapping mode. By re-designing traditional touch-to-audio interactions, ChartA11y also extends to accessible scatter plots, addressing the under-explored challenges posed by their non-linear data distribution. Our main contributions encompass the detailed participatory design process and the resulting system, ChartA11y, offering a novel approach for blind users to access visualizations on their smartphones.