Description
As we increasingly rely on visualization to communicate about data, lack of equitable information access for blind and low vision (BLV) people can exclude people from important conversations. But what does it mean to successfully make a visualization accessible? In this talk, I reflect on lessons learned from 5 years of accessible visualization research. The idea of decentering the visual modality has emerged as an important frame in my work for understanding needs and guiding design. Decentering vision reframes the design of accessible representations away from repurposing existing charts, toward interactive multimodal authoring and reading experiences. Decentering vision also encourages us to think about the goals of BLV people in socio-technical terms of participation and collaboration, beyond mere individual access. Finally, decentering vision suggests alternate ways the visualization community might think about the process of giving sensory form to data.
