skip to main content
10.1145/3453892.3458045acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagespetraConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Tactile Heatmaps: A Novel Visualisation Technique for Data Analysis with Tactile Charts

Published: 29 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Analysing large data sets for various purposes is a growing requirement for many professions. Tactile charts are suitable to enable people with visual impairment and blindness performing data analysis tasks. However, only a few approaches focus on the development of tactile charts for data analysis purposes. Concepts are needed to represent a sufficient amount of data with tactile charts and address arising challenges, such as information overload. In this paper, we first discuss and analyse the scalability of data represented by tactile charts using tactile scatterplots. We further address the data size limitations and present methods to identify critical, tactile representation with limited readability respecting the analysis task. Moreover, we propose methods to increase the amount of data represented in tactile scatterplots. We further introduce tactile heatmaps as an innovative and new concept for haptic data representation that utilises different elevation levels. We evaluated our design concept as well as the feasibility of varying elevation levels with 11 blind and visually impaired people. We compared four design conditions for embossed tactile heatmaps as well as the suitability of 3D-printed heatmaps. The results show that tactile heatmaps are suitable for representing more data than previously known tactile representation methods. They support obtaining an overview of a high amount of data and can be applied for data analysis purposes.

References

[1]
Frances K. Aldrich and Alan J. Parkin. 1987. Tangible Line Graphs: An Experimental Investigation of Three Formats Using Capsule Paper. Human Factors 29, 3 (1987), 301–309. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872088702900304 arXiv:https://doi.org/10.1177/001872088702900304PMID: 3623565.
[2]
John L. Barth. 1984. Incised Grids: Enhancing the Readability of Tangible Graphs for the Blind. Human Factors 26, 1 (1984), 61–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872088402600106 arXiv:https://doi.org/10.1177/001872088402600106PMID: 6735408.
[3]
Jacques Bertin. 1974. Grafische Semiologie. Diagramme–Netze–Karten.(1974).
[4]
E. Bertini, A. Tatu, and D. Keim. 2011. Quality Metrics in High-Dimensional Data Visualization: An Overview and Systematization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 17, 12(2011), 2203–2212. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2011.229
[5]
Braille Authority of North America and Canadian Braille Authority. 2010. Guidelines and standards for tactile graphics. http://www.brailleauthority.org/tg.
[6]
Ed Huai-hsin Chi. 2000. A taxonomy of visualization techniques using the data state reference model. In IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization 2000. INFOVIS 2000. Proceedings. IEEE, 69–75.
[7]
Sidney S Culbert and William T Stellwagen. 1963. Tactual discrimination of textures. Perceptual and Motor Skills 16, 2 (1963), 545–552.
[8]
Snir Dinar, Jonathan Rowell, and Don McCallum. 2005. The uniqueness of symbol profile as a design variable in tactile cartography. In International Cartographic Conference 2005.
[9]
Christin Engel, Nadja Konrad, and Gerhard Weber. 2020. TouchPen: Rich Interaction Technique for Audio-Tactile Charts by Means of Digital Pens. In International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs. Springer, 446–455.
[10]
Christin Engel and Gerhard Weber. 2017. Improve the accessibility of tactile charts. In IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Springer, 187–195.
[11]
Christin Engel and Gerhard Weber. 2018. A user study to evaluate tactile charts with blind and visually impaired people. In International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs. Springer, 177–184.
[12]
Christin Engel and Gerhard Weber. 2019. User Study: A Detailed View on the Effectiveness and Design of Tactile Charts. In IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Springer, 63–82.
[13]
Danyel Fisher. 2016. Big data exploration requires collaboration between visualization and data infrastructures. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Human-In-the-Loop Data Analytics. 1–5.
[14]
John A Gardner and Vladimir Bulatov. 2006. Scientific Diagrams Made Easy with IVEO ™. (2006), 1243–1250.
[15]
Timo Götzelmann. 2016. LucentMaps: 3D Printed Audiovisual Tactile Maps for Blind and Visually Impaired People. In Proceedings of the 18th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Reno, Nevada, USA) (ASSETS ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 81–90. https://doi.org/10.1145/2982142.2982163
[16]
R. Gupta, P. V. M. Rao, M. Balakrishnan, and S. Mannheimer. 2019. Evaluating the Use of Variable Height in Tactile Graphics. In 2019 IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC). 121–126. https://doi.org/10.1109/WHC.2019.8816083
[17]
Sandra Jehoel, Snir Dinar, Don McCallum, Jonathan Rowell, and Simon Ungar. 2005. A scientific approach to tactile map design: Minimum elevation of tactile map symbols. In Proceedings of XXII International Cartographic Conference A Coruρa, Spain.
[18]
Sandra Jehoel, Don McCallum, Jonathan Rowell, and Simon Ungar. 2006. An empirical approach on the design of tactile maps and diagrams: The cognitive tactualization approach. British Journal of Visual Impairment 24, 2 (2006), 67–75.
[19]
Jimmy Johansson and Matthew Cooper. 2008. A screen space quality method for data abstraction. In Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 27. Wiley Online Library, 1039–1046.
[20]
D. A. Keim and A. Herrmann. 1998. The Gridfit algorithm: an efficient and effective approach to visualizing large amounts of spatial data. In Proceedings Visualization ’98 (Cat. No.98CB36276). 181–188. https://doi.org/10.1109/VISUAL.1998.745301
[21]
Susan J. Lederman and Jamie I. Campbell. 1982. Tangible Graphs for the Blind. Human Factors 24, 1 (1982), 85–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872088202400109 arXiv:https://doi.org/10.1177/001872088202400109PMID: 7068153.
[22]
Jing Li, Jean-Bernard Martens, and Jarke J van Wijk. 2010. A model of symbol size discrimination in scatterplots. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2553–2562.
[23]
H. Liao, Y. Wu, L. Chen, and W. Chen. 2018. Cluster-Based Visual Abstraction for Multivariate Scatterplots. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 24, 9(2018), 2531–2545. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2017.2754480
[24]
Justin Matejka, Fraser Anderson, and George Fitzmaurice. 2015. Dynamic opacity optimization for scatter plots. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2707–2710.
[25]
Round Table on Information Access for People with Print Disabilities Inc.2005. Guidelines on Conveying Visual Information. (2005).
[26]
Denise Prescher, Jens Bornschein, and Gerhard Weber. 2017. Consistency of a Tactile Pattern Set. 10, 2 (2017), 1–29.
[27]
P. Rosen and G. J. Quadri. 2020. LineSmooth: An Analytical Framework for Evaluating the Effectiveness of Smoothing Techniques on Line Charts. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2020), 1–1. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2020.3030421
[28]
William Schiff and Herbert Isikow. 1966. Stimulus redundancy in the tactile perception of histograms.International Journal for the Education of the Blind (1966).
[29]
Ben Shneiderman. 2003. The eyes have it: A task by data type taxonomy for information visualizations. In The craft of information visualization. Elsevier, 364–371.
[30]
R Vasconcellos. 1991. Knowing the Amazon through tactual graphics. In Proceedings 15th International.
[31]
Tetsuya Watanabe, Toshimitsu Yamaguchi, and Masaki Nakagawa. 2012. Development of software for automatic creation of embossed graphs: Comparison of non-visual data presentation methods and development up-to-date. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) 7382 LNCS, PART 1(2012), 174–181. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31522-0_25
[32]
Allison Woodruff, James Landay, and Michael Stonebraker. 1998. Constant density visualizations of non-uniform distributions of data. In Proceedings of the 11th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology. 19–28.
[33]
J. S. Yi, Y. a. Kang, J. Stasko, and J. A. Jacko. 2007. Toward a Deeper Understanding of the Role of Interaction in Information Visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 13, 6(2007), 1224–1231. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2007.70515

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)From Sight to Touch: Designing Tactile Data Physicalizations for Non-sighted Users2024 1st Workshop on Accessible Data Visualization (AccessViz)10.1109/AccessViz64636.2024.00007(9-13)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
PETRA '21: Proceedings of the 14th PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments Conference
June 2021
593 pages
ISBN:9781450387927
DOI:10.1145/3453892
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 the author(s) 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].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 June 2021

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. accessible charts
  2. heatmap
  3. tactile charts
  4. tactile data analysis
  5. tactile information visualisation

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

PETRA '21

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)75
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3
Reflects downloads up to 26 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)From Sight to Touch: Designing Tactile Data Physicalizations for Non-sighted Users2024 1st Workshop on Accessible Data Visualization (AccessViz)10.1109/AccessViz64636.2024.00007(9-13)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

HTML Format

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media