Ather Sharif
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States
JavaScript visualization libraries are widely used to create online data visualizations but provide limited access to their information for screen-reader users. Building on prior findings about the experiences of screen-reader users with online data visualizations, we present VoxLens, an open-source JavaScript plug-in that--with a single line of code--improves the accessibility of online data visualizations for screen-reader users using a multi-modal approach. Specifically, VoxLens enables screen-reader users to obtain a holistic summary of presented information, play sonified versions of the data, and interact with visualizations in a "drill-down" manner using voice-activated commands. Through task-based experiments with 21 screen-reader users, we show that VoxLens improves the accuracy of information extraction and interaction time by 122% and 36%, respectively, over existing conventional interaction with online data visualizations. Our interviews with screen-reader users suggest that VoxLens is a "game-changer" in making online data visualizations accessible to screen-reader users, saving them time and effort.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517431
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2022.acm.org/)