Alan Lundgard News Today

Researchers have developed prototypes of data visualizations that enable blind and low-vision people who use screen readers to more easily explore information and gain deeper insights about chart data. They plan to turn these prototypes into a software tool that could help designers make data visualizations accessible and navigable.

MIT researchers conducted a study with blind and sighted readers to determine the most useful descriptive alternative text to include with a chart. They developed a four-level framework that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a chart caption, whether it is generated by a human author or a machine learning algorithm.