When Refreshable Tactile Displays Meet Conversational Agents: Investigating Accessible Data Presentation and Analysis with Touch and Speech

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Despite the recent surge of research efforts to make data visualizations accessible to people who are blind or have low vision (BLV), how to support BLV people's data analysis remains an important and challenging question. As refreshable tactile displays (RTDs) become cheaper and conversational agents continue to improve, their combination provides a promising approach to support BLV people's interactive data exploration and analysis. To understand how BLV people would use and react to a system combining an RTD with a conversational agent, we conducted a Wizard-of-Oz study with 11 BLV participants, where they interacted with line charts, bar charts, and isarithmic maps. Our analysis of participants' interactions led to the identifcation of nine distinct patterns. We also learned that the choice of modalities depended on the type of task and prior experience with tactile graphics, and that participants strongly preferred the combination of RTD and speech to a single modality. In addition, participants with more tactile experience described how tactile images facilitated a deeper engagement with the data and supported independent interpretation. Our fndings will inform the design of interfaces for such interactive mixed-modality systems.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)864-874
Number of pages11
JournalIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Volume1
Issue number31
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2025

Keywords

  • Accessible data visualization
  • conversational agents
  • interactive data exploration
  • people who are blind or have low vision
  • refreshable tactile displays
  • Wizard of Oz study

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