Title: Data accessibility for people with visual impairments
Abstract: As society becomes data-driven, data representations such as charts and data tables are prevalent in online news, government reports, and science publications. Charts, for example, are a powerful medium to summarize complex data effectively, as they offload the cognitive burden of a reader by leveraging visual perception. However, people with visual impairments have been largely underserved in receiving the benefit of “using vision to think” that these data representations can offer. In this talk, I will present how our research group makes inaccessible data representations accessible to people with visual impairments by investigating the needs of visually impaired individuals and developing systems to mitigate inaccessibility. I will also introduce various alternative modalities we used (e.g., audio, text) to convey visuals without visuals.