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Understanding Screen-Reader Users’ Experiences with Online Data Visualizations

Published: 17 October 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Online data visualizations are widely used to communicate information from simple statistics to complex phenomena, supporting people in gaining important insights from data. However, due to the defining visual nature of data visualizations, extracting information from visualizations can be difficult or impossible for screen-reader users. To assess screen-reader users’ challenges with online data visualizations, we conducted two empirical studies: (1) A qualitative study with nine screen-reader users, and (2) a quantitative study with 36 screen-reader and 36 non-screen-reader users. Our results show that due to the inaccessibility of online data visualizations, screen-reader users extract information 61.48% less accurately and spend 210.96% more time interacting with online data visualizations compared to non-screen-reader users. Additionally, our findings show that online data visualizations are commonly indiscoverable to screen readers. In visualizations that are discoverable and comprehensible, screen-reader users suggested tabular and textual representation of data as techniques to improve the accessibility of online visualizations. Taken together, our results provide empirical evidence of the inequalities screen-readers users face in their interaction with online data visualizations.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ASSETS '21: Proceedings of the 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
    October 2021
    730 pages
    ISBN:9781450383066
    DOI:10.1145/3441852
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 17 October 2021

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    Author Tags

    1. challenges
    2. data
    3. screen readers
    4. techniques
    5. visualizations

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    • (2024)Workshop as an Educational Intervention: Improving the Knowledge and Understanding of Data Visualization Accessibility for Visualization CreatorsProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3688489(1-6)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
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