Cocomix: Utilizing Comments to Improve Non-Visual Webtoon Accessibility

Jeffrey P. Bigham Yi-Hao Peng JiWoong Jang + 1 lainnya

26 Maret 2021

Presenters commonly use slides as visual aids for informative talks. When presenters fail to verbally describe the content on their slides, blind and visually impaired audience members lose access to necessary content, making the presentation difficult to follow. Our analysis of 90 presentation videos revealed that 72% of 610 visual elements (e.g., images, text) were insufficiently described. To help presenters create accessible presentations, we introduce Presentation A11y, a system that provides real-time and post-presentation accessibility feedback. Our system analyzes visual elements on the slide and the transcript of the verbal presentation to provide element-level feedback on what visual content needs to be further described or even removed. Presenters using our system with their own slide-based presentations described more of the content on their slides, and identified 3.26 times more accessibility problems to fix after the talk than when using a traditional slide-based presentation interface. Integrating accessibility feedback into content creation tools will improve the accessibility of informational content for all.

E. Harris Leah Findlater Amy Pavel + 3 lainnya

25 April 2022

While researchers have examined alternative (alt) text for social media and news contexts, few have studied the status and challenges for authoring alt text of figures in computing-related publications. These figures are distinct, often conveying dense visual information, and may necessitate unique accessibility solutions. Accordingly, we explored how to support authors in creating alt text in computing publications---specifically in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). We conducted two studies: (1) an analysis of 300 recently published figures at a general HCI conference (ACM CHI), and (2) interviews with 10 researchers in HCI and related fields who have varying levels of experience writing alt text. Our findings characterize the prevalence, quality, and patterns of recent figure alt text and captions. We further identify challenges authors encounter, describing their workflow barriers and confusions around how to compose alt text for complex figures. We conclude by outlining a research agenda on process, education, and tooling opportunities to improve alt text in computing-related publications.

Crystal Lee Arvind Satyanarayan Alan Lundgard + 3 lainnya

10 Mei 2022

Current web accessibility guidelines ask visualization designers to support screen readers via basic non‐visual alternatives like textual descriptions and access to raw data tables. But charts do more than summarize data or reproduce tables; they afford interactive data exploration at varying levels of granularity—from fine‐grained datum‐by‐datum reading to skimming and surfacing high‐level trends. In response to the lack of comparable non‐visual affordances, we present a set of rich screen reader experiences for accessible data visualization and exploration. Through an iterative co‐design process, we identify three key design dimensions for expressive screen reader accessibility: structure, or how chart entities should be organized for a screen reader to traverse; navigation, or the structural, spatial, and targeted operations a user might perform to step through the structure; and, description, or the semantic content, composition, and verbosity of the screen reader's narration. We operationalize these dimensions to prototype screen‐reader‐accessible visualizations that cover a diverse range of chart types and combinations of our design dimensions. We evaluate a subset of these prototypes in a mixed‐methods study with 13 blind and visually impaired readers. Our findings demonstrate that these designs help users conceptualize data spatially, selectively attend to data of interest at different levels of granularity, and experience control and agency over their data analysis process. An accessible HTML version of this paper is available at: http://vis.csail.mit.edu/pubs/rich-screen-reader-vis-experiences.

Richard E. Ladner Aashaka Desai Jennifer Mankoff

19 April 2023

Speechreading is the art of using visual and contextual cues in the environment to support listening. Often used by d/Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (d/DHH) individuals, it highlights nuances of rich communication. However, lived experiences of speechreaders are underdocumented in HCI literature, and the impact of online environments and interactions of captioning with speechreading has not been explored in depth. We bridge these gaps through a three-part study consisting of formative interviews, design probes, and design sessions with 12 d/DHH individuals who speechread. Our primary contribution is to understand the lived experience of speechreading in online communication, and thus to better understand the richness and variety of techniques d/DHH individuals use to provision access. We highlight technical, environmental and sociocultural factors that impact communication accessibility, explore the design space of speechreading supports and share considerations for the design future of speechreading technology.

Sile O'Modhrain Gene S-H Kim Sean Follmer + 1 lainnya

29 April 2022

Online data visualizations play an important role in informing public opinion but are often inaccessible to screen reader users. To address the need for accessible data representations on the web that provide direct, multimodal, and up-to-date access to the data, we investigate audio data narratives –which combine textual descriptions and sonification (the mapping of data to non-speech sounds). We conduct two co-design workshops with screen reader users to define design principles that guide the structure, content, and duration of a data narrative. Based on these principles and relevant auditory processing characteristics, we propose a dynamic programming approach to automatically generate an audio data narrative from a given dataset. We evaluate our approach with 16 screen reader users. Findings show with audio narratives, users gain significantly more insights from the data. Users describe data narratives help them better extract and comprehend the information in both the sonification and description.