A syntactic analysis of accessibility to a corpus of statistical graphs

ABSTRACT

Designing graphs and charts visually by means of graphing applications such as OpenOffice or MS Excel is extremely efficient and cost-effective. However, one of the drawbacks of such approach is that graphs are sometimes involuntarily made less accessible by, for instance, using a text box as title. In this paper we evaluate a corpus of 120 ecologically-valid statistical graphs for accessibility problems, discuss possible algorithms to solve these problems and finally propose the OM (Object Model) Principle, which states that any digital object is made more accessible by simply using the application's model for that object: for instance, the TITLE field for the title text.

REFERENCES

• 1: Jacques Bertin, Semiology of graphics, University of Wisconsin Press, 1983
• 2: Jeffrey P. Bigham , Ryan S. Kaminsky , Richard E. Ladner , Oscar M. Danielsson , Gordon L. Hempton, WebInSight:: making web images accessible, Proceedings of the 8th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility, October 23-25, 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1168987.1169018]
• 3: Peter C. H. Cheng , James Cupit , Nigel R. Shadbolt, Supporting diagrammatic knowledge acquisition: an ontological analysis of Cartesian graphs, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, v.54 n.4, p.457-494, April 2001 [doi>10.1006/ijhc.2000.0455]
• 4: L. Ferres, M. Dumontier, and N. Villanueva-Rosales. Semantic query answering with time-series graphs. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Vocabularies, Ontologies and Rules for The Enterprise (VORTE 2007), 2007.
• 5: L. Ferres, A. Parush, Z. Li, Y. Oppacher, and G. Lindgaard. Representing and querying line graphs in natural language: The iGraph system. In SmartGraphics 2006, number 4073 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 248--253, Berlin Heidelberg, 2006. Springer-Verlag.
• 6: L. Ferres, A. Parush, S. Roberts, and G. Lindgaard. Helping People with Visual Impairments Gain Access to Graphical Information Through Natural Language: The iGraph System. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computers for Handicapped Persons, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag, 2006.
• 7: Leo Ferres , Petro Verkhogliad , Louis Boucher, (Natural language) interaction with graphical representations of statistical data, Proceedings of the 2007 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility (W4A), p.132-133, May 07-08, 2007, Banff, Canada [doi>10.1145/1243441.1243446]
• 8: Leo Ferres , Petro Verkhogliad , Gitte Lindgaard , Louis Boucher , Antoine Chretien , Martin Lachance, Improving accessibility to statistical graphs: the iGraph-Lite system, Proceedings of the 9th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility, October 15-17, 2007, Tempe, Arizona, USA [doi>10.1145/1296843.1296857]
• 9: Z. Ben Fredj , D. A. Duce, GraSSML: accessible smart schematic diagrams for all, Proceedings of the 2006 international cross-disciplinary workshop on Web accessibility (W4A): Building the mobile web: rediscovering accessibility?, May 22-22, 2006, Edinburgh, U.K. [doi>10.1145/1133219.1133229]
• 10: Nancy L. Green , Giuseppe Carenini , Stephan Kerpedjiev , Joe Mattis , Johanna D. Moore , Steven F. Roth, Autobrief: an experimental system for the automatic generation of briefings in integrated text and information graphics, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, v.61 n.1, p.32-70, July 2004 [doi>10.1016/j.ijhcs.2003.10.007]
• 11: N. Green, G. Carenini, S. Kerpedjiev, S. F. Roth, and J. Moore. A media-independent content language for integrated text and graphics generation. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Content Visualization and Intermedia Representations (CVIR'98) of the 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING '98) and the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'98), August 1998.
• 12: S. Harper , S. Bechhofer, Semantic triage for increased web accessibility, IBM Systems Journal, v.44 n.3, p.637-648, August 2005
• 13: Jörn W. Janneck , Robert Esser, A predicate-based approach to defining visual language syntax, Proceedings of the IEEE 2001 Symposia on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC'01), p.40, September 05-07, 2001
• 14: Stephan Kerpedjiev , Steven F. Roth, Mapping communicative goals into conceptual tasks to generate graphics in discourse, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, p.157-164, January 09-12, 2000, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States [doi>10.1145/325737.325814]
• 15: S. Kosslyn. Understanding charts and graphs. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 3:185--225, 1989.
• 16: J. Larkin and H. Simon. Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand words. Cognitive Science, 11(1):65--100, 1987.
• 17: S. Lewandowsky and I. Spence. The perception of statistical graphs. Sociological Methods and Research, 18:200--242, 1989.
• 18: Vibhu O. Mittal , Giuseppe Carenini , Johanna D. Moore , Steven Roth, Describing complex charts in natural language: a caption generation system, Computational Linguistics, v.24 n.3, September 1998
• 19: Sandeep R Patil, Accessible image file formats: the need and the way (position paper), Proceedings of the 2007 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility (W4A), May 07-08, 2007, Banff, Canada [doi>10.1145/1243441.1243455]
• 20: S. Pinker. A theory of graph comprehension. In R. Freedle, editor, Artificial intelligence and the future of testing, pages 73--126. L. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1990.
• 21: Steven F. Roth , William E Hefley, Intelligent multimedia presentation systems: research and principles, Intelligent multimedia interfaces, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Menlo Park, CA, 1993
• 22: Steven F. Roth , John Kolojejchick , Joe Mattis , Mei C. Chuah , Jade Goldstein , Octavio Juarez, SAGE tools: a knowledge-based environment for designing and perusing data visualizations, Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems, p.27-28, April 24-28, 1994, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/259963.259992]
• 23: Edward R. Tufte, The visual display of quantitative information, Graphics Press, Cheshire, CT, 1986
• 24: Leland Wilkinson, The grammar of graphics, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., New York, NY, 1999
• 25: World Wide Web Consortium. Extensible Markup Language (XML). http://www.w3.org/XML/, 2007.
• 26: World Wide Web Consortium. Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fourth Edition), DTD Definition. http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/\#dt-doctype, 2007.
• 27: World Wide Web Consortium. Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT-TECHS, 2000.
• 28: World Wide Web Consortium. Web accessibility initiative. http://www.w3.org/WAI/, 2006.
• 29: World Wide Web Consortium. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT, 1999.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.7 Digital Libraries
          Subjects: Dissemination

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.4 Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods
          Subjects: Representations (procedural and rule-based)

General Terms:
Human Factors

Keywords:
accessibility (blind and visually impaired), knowledge representation, statistical graphs