Understanding and Reducing the Challenges Faced by Creators of Accessible Online Data Visualizations

We sought to understand and reduce the challenges creators face with making their data visualizations accessible. Specifically, we administered a formative survey of 57 creators to comprehend their challenges, perceived importance, knowledge, and prioritization of data visualization accessibility. Participants identified five interventions to minimize their challenges: Workshops, Emulators, Evaluators, Feedback Collectors, and Multi-Modal Automated Tools. Additionally, we report specifications and recommendations from 12 visualization creators for effective versions of each intervention, gathered via semi-structured interviews. Utilizing our findings, such as a “mini-survey” format that is effective for collecting accessibility-related feedback from screen-reader users, we implemented and integrated these interventions into VoxLens (Sharif et al., 2022). We assessed our enhancements through a task-based user study with 10 visualization creators, finding 44%, 17%, and 12% improvements in their understanding of screen-reader users’ challenges with data visualizations, knowledge of visualization accessibility, and perceived usefulness of the enhanced VoxLens, respectively.