RDIGThe goal of this event is to explore research on how to best model and visualize different types of data on the Web so that it is accessible for people with various disabilities. The data may be scientific measurements expressed in numeric tables or bar charts, or areas where icons for individual objects or people are organized together according to their similarity in some dimensions while other dimensions are illustrated, for instance, by size, form, and color in the icons. The data may also be some relationships between objects, for instance, it may be the links between all the Web documents in a certain Web site or relationships between some documents in several Web sites.
Visualizations try to 1) help the users to see new, interesting relationships in the data or 2) help to better illustrate relationships that are already known to be useful. Users who cannot see the visualizations need to be able to get information about the new relationships, such as clusters of objects or lone objects differing in some sense from their neighbors, e.g. objects can be much bigger or have different color or form than the others. The main problem here is to explain the patterns visualized by graphic means in language and help provide a list of possible queries that come to the mind of the user looking at the visualization.
We also need good practices to visualize relationships that are known to be interesting in an accessible way. For instance, in a bar chart it may be interesting that some bars are several times longer than others or that some are so small that they are barely noticeable. Reading the exact numbers by voice output may be useful but it does not capture the instant recognition of the one bar that is twice as long as anything else in the chart.
Users who have cognitive difficulties may benefit from certain kinds of visualizations or may need simplified presentations of the very complex visualizations and users who have difficulties in interacting spatially need means to refer to the information by sequential commands.
Semantic Web technologies based on metadata often provide a useful way to present the data and relationships that are going to be visualized so that different alternative visualization can be created from them according to the user needs. These technologies provide means for modelling data, merging data from different sources, and presenting different views to the data. It may also be possible to provide lists of queries to help users ask the right questions to see patterns in the data. Also visualizations of relationships in the Web can be based on metadata to help users to better navigate in Web information.
Here are some links to examples of visualizations and accessibility research:
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| Prep for meeting | Outcome | |
| Planning meeting #1 | Review possible topics | Topic and timeline |
| Planning meeting #2 | Collect resources and questions related to the topic. | Collection of resources, discussion questions |
| Planning meeting #3 | ? | Call for participation, list of places to send the call for participation |
| Planning meeting #4 | Review submissions that result from call for participation | List of people to contact to present |
| Planning meeting #5 | Review who has or has not accepted to present | List of presentations for the event, Event agenda |
| Planning meeting N | ?? | ?? |
| Event | Generate agenda, advertise event, publish presenter's html slides to W3C site | Proceedings (ala template) |
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$Date: 2003/07/09 22:09:39 $ $Author: marja $
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