Accessible Visualisations on the Web

Data visualizations are used everywhere on the web to convey data and insight. However, interpreting these visualizations is reliant on sight, which poses a problem for the visually impaired who rely on screen readers. Alternative text descriptions are often missing from visualizations or not of a helpful quality, which the screen readers rely on to interpret them for the user. In this short paper, we propose Alt-Texify, a pipeline to generate alternative text descriptions for SVG-based bar, line and scatter charts. Our pipeline classifies the chart type and extracts the data and labels from the SVG code and inserts the relevant information into a description template. Our approach extracts the data and labels deterministically, allowing for factually accurate descriptions 99.74% of the time.

Project Lead

Dr Humphrey Obie

Project Team

Uma Wickramatne, Aspen Belle