Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
76 results found tagged data visualization.
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Making Charts Speak: LLM-Based Conversational Chart Question Answering for Blind and Low-Vision Users
Das, Tarun, and Mueller present GraphWhisper, a conversational system that lets blind and low-vision (BLV) users explore chart images (JPEG, PNG) through natural-language questions, without requiring the chart data to be pre-structured in formats lik…
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"Chasing Shadows": Understanding Personal Data Externalization and Self-Tracking for Neurodivergent Individuals
This CHI 2026 paper examines a mismatch between the promises of self-tracking and personal informatics — rich self-awareness, reflection, insight — and the lived experience of neurodivergent individuals, for whom stable routines, generalised Likert i…
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GeoVisA11y: An AI-based Geovisualization Question-Answering System for Screen-Reader Users
This CHI 2026 paper tackles a long-neglected corner of accessible data visualization: geovisualizations — choropleth maps, dot density maps, and similar spatially encoded displays that pack demographic, environmental, and public-health information in…
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Three Modalities, Two Design Probes, One Prototype, and No Vision: Experience-Based Co-Design of a Multi-modal 3D Data Visualization Tool
Kamath et al. report an Experience-Based Co-Design (EBCD) process in which five blind or low-vision (BLV) researchers and one sighted collaborator built a web-native, multimodal prototype for exploring 3D surface plots - a class of visualisation cent…
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Improving Low-Vision Chart Accessibility via On-Cursor Visual Context
Charts remain largely inaccessible to Low-Vision Individuals (LVI) because reading them requires holding both fine-grained data details and the broader visual context — axes, legend, grid lines, overview — in view at the same time, a task that magnif…
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Presenting Information in Sound
Sara Bly's 1982 CHI paper, written at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is one of the earliest systematic investigations of using computer-generated sound — rather than graphics — to present multivariate data to human analysts. Bly opens by arg…
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SmartColor: Disambiguation Framework for the Colorblind
This paper presents SmartColor, a framework that automatically repaints coloured documents so that people with colour vision deficiencies can perceive the same colour effects — such as contrast, shared colour grouping, and distinguishability — that t…
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PLUMB: Displaying Graphs to the Blind Using an Active Auditory Interface
This short paper presents PLUMB (exPLoring graphs at UMB), a system developed at UMass Boston that enables blind users to explore relational graphs through an active auditory interface on a tablet PC. The system addresses a fundamental barrier in com…
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iSonic: Interactive Sonification for Non-visual Data Exploration
This paper presents iSonic, an interactive sonification tool developed at the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab that enables vision-impaired users to explore geo-referenced statistical data such as population distribution, crime r…
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Evaluation of a Non-Visual Molecule Browser
This paper evaluates Kekulé, software designed to allow visually impaired users to explore chemical molecular structures — diagrams that are typically presented as two-dimensional graph schematics showing atoms (nodes) connected by bonds (edges). Mol…