Re: Master thesis on SVG accessibility

Hello Chris,

As you have probably deduced, this mailing list isn't terribly active these
days. But that's certainly not because SVG Accessibility is a "solved
problem". It's just one that doesn't have a lot of resources devoted to it.

So in that sense, I'd love to see more dedicated research work in the field.

On the academic side, it would be nice to see research (whether new user
studies or even good meta-summary of existing work) that increases the
understanding of the best ways to present graphical information—especially
high-density data graphics—to non-visual users on the web.

On the coding side, I think you've got some great ideas. The most valuable
contribution at this point would be to create tools that can result in
plenty of real-world enhanced data visualizations, and gather feedback from
developers and users. After all, we can't propose changes to the native
browser & screen reader behaviors until we have clear data about what those
changes should be!

JS-based tools that work in the browser are probably a good way to do that,
but (as Doug discovered with his Describler demo) they need to work with
more than just custom-made demo files if they are going to gain traction.
That either means a browser extension that can dissect any markup it comes
across (tricky) or working to change widely-used libraries that are
generating markup.

All that said: As someone who has gotten lost in an open-ended Master's
thesis herself, I would highly recommend that you think carefully about
what your research question is, to keep your goals narrow & clearly defined.

I can't offer too much else help myself, but I've passed your note on to
someone who is interested in researching keyboard accessibility best
practices for interactive data visualization & integrating them in the
Semiotic data viz library. Maybe you could collaborate to make sure that
the screen-reader experience is improved, too.

I've also pinged Doug Schepers via other channels. He's no longer with the
W3C, so might not be getting these emails delivered anymore, but I'm pretty
sure he is still working on projects related to accessible graphics on the
web.

You might also want to contact the EvoXLabs team, who have worked on web
accessibility within an academic framework.
http://evoxlabs.org/about

Best of luck,
~Amelia Bellamy-Royds


On Wed, 26 Sep 2018 at 00:34, Christopher-A. Kopel <kopel@student.tugraz.at>
wrote:

> Hi all!
>
> I am student of Information and Computer Engineering at the Graz
> University of Technology (Austria) and intend to start my master thesis
> in October. As I am blind, I would be highly interested in writing about
> a topic in the field of web accessibility.
>
> One of my professors, who mainly researches on data visualisation, had
> the idea that my thesis could deal with the accessibility of SVG, which
> seems very interesting to me, too. However, reading some publications
> about this topic (i.e., some of the recent W3C recommendations or
> recommendation proposals, respectively, as well as some texts and
> presentations by Doug Schepers and Léonie Watson), I got the impression
> that much good work has already been done on this. For this reason, I'd
> like to ask you for your opinions: Do you think that with a master
> thesis on the accessibility of SVG I could contribute to its
> improvement? If so, is there any work for me which you would regard as
> particularly valuable at the moment? It would be great if this could
> include any kind of implementation but I'm also fine with some analysis,
> testing, or evaluation. For example, I think of a tool (or maybe even
> better, a patch to a browser or screen reader) that transforms all
> usable information of an SVG document into a form that is
> well-comprehensible for a blind user, taking Doug Schepers' "Describler"
> as a starting point. Another idea of mine would be a patch to an SVG
> authoring tool or an SVG scripting library like 3d.js that improves the
> accessibility of the resulting SVG structures.
>
> Thank you very much in advance for your feedback and any suggestions!
>
> Cheers,
>
>     Chris
>
>
>