Re: Master thesis on SVG accessibility

Hello,

I thought I responded to this the day after it was sent...but it looks like
it got stuck in my drafts!

I have provided ADA guidance to developers who create infographics and data
visualization with SVG as an effort to make accessible data visualization
and infographics that don't rely on text alternatives. Since it's a
master's thesis and not a doctoral dissertation, I would recommend focusing
on a narrow enough scope, and in my experience SVG is used across so many
components that it feels better suited as a dissertation topic.

That being said, focusing on SVG used as a specific component solution and
the accessibility problems it creates and/or accessibility solutions it
solves would be a much more appropriate scope. In fact, focusing just on
data visualization would be an excellent topic. When I was at JPMorgan
Chase, we ran into an issue where one of our products that showed economic
trends for trading wasn't accessible to color-blind users (who couldn't
distinguish between colors easily) or blind users...a large table
"alternative" of the data won't really help blind users make
determinations. SVG was commonly sighted as a way to solve some, but not
all, problems, but it also has its fair share of limitations.

I'm excited to see what you do!
-Tori Clark

On Mon, Oct 15, 2018 at 12:32 PM Christopher-A. Kopel <
kopel@student.tugraz.at> wrote:

> Hello Amelia,
>
> Thank you very much for your kind reply and for forwarding my post! I'm
> happy to hear that, after all, there is still something going on in this
> field and that there would definitely be some work for me to do. After
> you had forwarded my post to Doug he wrote me very soon confirming this.
> He said that he would like to collaborate with me on one of his current
> projects related to this field. We will probably have a call on this the
> next days. - So, you already helped me a lot! :-)
>
> Yes, I also already had the quite frustrating experience of getting lost
> in a study-related project, which took me some months more than I had
> intended, so I'm definitely trying to avoid this now. ;-)
>
> Cheers,
>
>     Chris
>
>
> Am 07.10.2018 um 05:53 schrieb Amelia Bellamy-Royds:
> > 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 <mailto: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
> >
> >
>
>