Abstract

Charts such as bar or pie charts are often used to represent data and their relation. Tactile charts are widely used to enable blind and visually-impaired people to explore charts through the sense of touch. Effective tactile chart design differs from its visual counterpart due to sequential nature of touch. Accordingly, in a study with 48 blind and visually-impaired participants we investigated the preferences for chart types, design features and errors in reading data values. We developed bar, line and pie charts as well as scatterplots with different layouts and novel design properties. Participants answered questions concerning the readability, content and data, specific design aspects as well as a personal rating. Overall, participants answered 80% of nominal questions regarding minima, maxima, and comparisons, correctly. Blind participants achieved a corrected mean error rate of 4.5%, when reading single points or intersections, for example. More specifically, we directly compare chart types, and discuss the results for specific design considerations (e.g. distances between bars, width of bars, design and use of grid lines in scatterplots) by comparing different charts.

Highlights

  • IntroductionGraphics are important to communicate and represent ideas, relations or spatial information

  • Graphics are important to communicate and represent ideas, relations or spatial information. Information graphics such as bar or line charts are often used in our daily life to represent data and its meaning

  • Based on several pilot studies in which we evaluated the readability of specific design criteria, we developed a total of 21 tactile bar charts, line charts, scatterplots and pie charts, which we evaluated with 48 blind and visually-impaired people

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Summary

Introduction

Graphics are important to communicate and represent ideas, relations or spatial information Information graphics such as bar or line charts are often used in our daily life to represent data and its meaning. Blind and visually-impaired people cannot access information graphics and its underlying data Accessibility guidelines such as BITV (Barrier-Free Information Technology Ordinance) state to provide a verbal description of non-textual content. Existing guidelines (e.g. BANA guidelines [?]) recommend describing the elements and structure of a chart while providing the underlying data within a data table. This is not useful for complex charts or for understanding the content of the chart. Analysis of raw data in a table data is very difficult, whereby especially gaining an overview or detecting trends

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