I'm e-attending a conference on Visualization and Disabilities run online and through the phones by the W3C. The first speaker is the director of the SETI project at Berkeley, Kent Cullers who, I am interested to note, was the first totally blind physicist to earn a PhD in physics. His solution is an image-to-braille printer that produces "grayscale"--that is, variably-sized dots that he can run his fingers over and explore. (Others simulate this with a Phantom device--those are interactive, however, which means that you can synchronize the pen-feeling with sounds and audio cues.)
A different speaker points us to AUDIODOOM (ref, google), which seems to make sounds based on positions within a space. So does this project at HCIL, which tries to summarize chunks of maps ("east to west", "north to south").
A speaker from IBM has an attempt to write textual descriptions of charts: a chart is then simplified to the readable text. I have some concerns about whether this is sufficient, but it's a start... in particular, it summarizes bar charts with a single word ("medium"), which strikes me as a little painful.
(Other speakers mention a markup for enhancing web pages with sign language gesture-notation for the deaf, or an attempt to add more navigation information for the learning-disabled).
The lesson that I'm beginning to get is that for most forms, you need to simplify the data in some way or another. Yet if you remove data, then people can't do everything. Kent Culler, in particular, rebels hard against the idea of translations that lose information and fidelity: "The more dimensions I can look at at once, the happier I am."
The challenge, I think, is working out hierarchies of information: how do you provide a fast top-level of information, and then how do you allow a user to dig deeper into the data?
June 28, 2004 08:57 AM | TrackBack | in Other
