Description
Making data visualizations accessible to blind and low-vision (BLV) users has been an active area of research for many years. Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), particularly vision-language models, offer promising new opportunities for improving accessibility. While prior work has primarily focused on making individual charts accessible, there remains a significant gap in supporting complex, multi-view visualizations such as interactive dashboards. How can dashboards be made accessible to the BLV users? One possible solution is data physicalization or tactile displays. In this project, we explore if dashboards can be converted to tactile displays that can be synced with their digital counterparts?
Tasks
Build a physical data visualization dashboard using either 3D printed visualizations or techniques similar to described in the work by Jiasheng Li[1]. The final result could be a preliminary low fidelity prototype which needs to be evaluated with blind and low vision users.
[1] Jiasheng Li, Zeyu Yan, Ebrima Haddy Jarjue, Ashrith Shetty, and Huaishu Peng. 2022. TangibleGrid: Tangible Web Layout Design for Blind Users. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 47, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3526113.3545627
Requirements
- Knowledge of English language (source code comments and final report should be in English)
- Knowledge of web based technologies
- Knowledge of hardware and a bit of electronics will be even better.
Environment
The project should be implemented as a standalone application, a low fidelity prototype also works.