- From: Marja-Riitta Koivunen <marja@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 11:03:43 -0400
- To: "Markku T. Hakkinen" <hakkinen@dinf.ne.jp>, "Public-Wai-Rd" <public-wai-rd@w3.org>
Promised rewrite of the rewrite to bring back some ideas of my original text while keeping this in short form. Here it is Marja 2. Introduction Occasionally Web users need to make sense of complex information and large data sets. This information includes scientific measurements, information of models, demographic information, information of Web communities, relationships between Web pages, and Web metadata. Researchers try to develop innovative graphical presentations of the information (visualizations) to make it easier for a user to see what is happening with one glimpse, make comparisons in several dimensions, and find irregularities or anomalities from the information. Especially visualizations try to 1) help users see new, interesting information or relationships between data or 2) help illustrate structures and known, useful relationships. Our visual system is very good in processing a lot of data in parallel, seeing structures and detecting irregularities. However, users who cannot see well need other methods to learn about the relationships. In addition, users with cognitive disabilities may need simplified presentations of complex visualizations, and users who have difficulty in interacting with spatial information may need information presented or operated sequentially. On the other hand, people with reading disabilities may find visualizations easier to understand than text. The goal of this event is to explore visualization research and discuss possible models that could be used to make data accessible for people with various disabilities. For example, we have a visualization of related Web sites that use icons with different sizes and colors to represent number of sites connections and the domain area, and clusters of icons to indicate related Web sites. How should these patterns be made available to a user who is blind? Is it helpful to explain the patterns in a static text description, or should the user be offered a structure or different structures that can be navigated with sequentially? What structures are best to form mental models of the information? What about a list of automatically detected irregularities or a list of questions that can be asked about the data that allows one to get started and then dig deeper to expose more relationships? Another example is a bar chart; some bars are several times longer than others while some are so small they are barely noticeable. Reading the number associated with each bar may be useful but it does not capture the instant recognition of seeing one bar twice as long as any other in the chart. How can we visualize these relationships in an accessible way?
Received on Wednesday, 15 October 2003 11:07:37 UTC