The other day we linked to a study whose purpose was to “investigate challenges faced by curators of data visualizations for blind and low-vision individuals.”

JooYoung Seo, the organizer of that project, provides further background:

With the exception of a few IRB-related constraints, below is my brief response to your feedback.

1. Unclear terminology. You recommended that we use the verb “create” instead of “curate” in our survey, and we completely agree with your confusion about this terminology. We chose to use the verb curate because our research was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to develop a tool that would make it easier for data curators to create accessible visualizations. We also began our research proposal as a community partnership with the Data Curation Network (DCN), so we were using terminology that was tailored to a specific professional group. In an effort to strike a better balance between the confusion of the terminology and the directionality of our research goals, we will add some explanations to make it easier to understand.

2. The inappropriateness of the term “visualization”. You raised the issue of the inappropriateness of using the term “visualization” in our survey to refer to accessible data “sensification”. This is very insightful.

I can assure you that our team is in no way trying to subscribe to or perpetuate the term visualization. As the PI, I am a lifelong blind person and my student who is co-leading this research is also a lifelong low-vision person, so we have given a lot of thought to the term “visualize”.

In our research, visualization is one way of encoding/decoding data representation. We believe that accessible data representation can only be achieved through multimodal data representation (sonification, tactile representation, text description, AI conversation, etc.) that comprehensively conveys various modalities along with visualization. Our initial research, Multimodal Access and Interactive Data Representation (MAIDR: https://github.com/uiuc-ischool-accessible-computing-lab/maidr), which we will present in May at the CHI2024 conference, reflects this belief, and this survey is an extension of our MAIDR research.

Despite the bias that the term visualization can introduce, we chose to use it in this survey for two reasons: first, we wanted to follow the convention of using terminology that is more easily understood by survey participants, assuming that they are data curators with varying levels of experience with accessibility, ranging from no experience to expert level experience. We could of course use the terms “data sensification” or “data representation” for further explanation, but since this initial study is focused on observing and understanding the status quo rather than “education,” we wanted to reduce potentially confusing new concepts as much as possible.

In parallel to our survey of data curators, we are also conducting a separate survey with blind people asking them about the accessibility issues with data visualization that they encounter in their daily lives. In that survey, we want to understand how blind people are approaching visualization.

Second, the reason we use the term visualization in our research involving blind and low-vision people is to challenge the misconception that being visually impaired excludes people from visualization altogether. For example, there are many blind and low-vision people who use their residual vision to approach visualization. Depending on when you were blind, there are some people who use the visualizations that remain in their brains as they learn. As someone who became blind as a teenager, I still use visual cues like color and brightness to help me learn and retain information.

If you cannot use the term visualize just because you can’t see, “See you tomorrow,” “Let’s see,” and “let me take a look” would also be unusable for blind people. Blind people are just as capable of using visual encoding/decoding.

I get his point on the term “visualization.” Indeed, I can visualize scenes with my eyes closed. In our paper, we used “sensification” in part to emphasize that we are interested in engaging other senses than vision, especially hearing and the muscular resistance sense.