Presentation Slides - VoxLens: Making Geospatial Data Visualizations Accessible to Blind and Low-Vision Users

JavaScript visualization libraries are widely used to create online data visualizations but provide limited access to their information for screen-reader users. Building on my prior findings about the experiences of screen-reader users with online data visualizations, I present VoxLens, an open-source JavaScript plug-in that with a single line of code improves the accessibility of online data visualizations for screen-reader users using a multi-modal approach. Specifucally, VoxLens enables screen-reader users to obtain a holistic summary of presented information, play sonified versions of the data, and interact with visualizations in a drill-down manner using voice-activated commands. VoxLens improves the accuracy of information extraction and interaction time by 164% and 50%, respectively, over existing conventional interaction with online data visualizations.