Workshop as an Educational Intervention: Improving the Knowledge and Understanding of Data Visualization Accessibility for Visualization Creators

Enhancing visualization creators’ knowledge and understanding of the accessibility of data visualizations remains a critical step toward reducing the digital divide screen-reader users experience. Recently, Sharif et al. shed light on the challenges visualization creators face with making data visualizations accessible to screen-reader users, identifying four technological interventions and one educational intervention (i.e., workshops) to minimize these challenges. Although they implemented the technological intervention and provided guidelines to conduct an effective workshop, they did not implement a workshop for creators. I extend their work by conducting a workshop for visualization creators based on their findings. My results show that the workshop improved the creators’ accessibility knowledge by 39%, prioritization of implementing accessibility by 15%, perceived importance of accessibility by 4%, challenges with making visualizations accessible by 16%, and desired frequency of conducting studies with screen-reader users by 157%.