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Making the Analytics Lifecycle Accessible: Accessible Data Visualizations through Sonification

Handouts

Presented at 11:45am in Colorado I-J on Friday, November 10, 2023.

#38864

Speaker(s)

  • Greg Kraus, Director of Product Accessibility, SAS

Session Details

  • Length of Session: 1-hr
  • Format: Lecture
  • Expertise Level: Beginner
  • Type of session: General Conference

Summary

There are many challenges making data visualizations fully accessible to people with visual impairments. SAS created the freely available SAS Graphics Accelerator to address these challenges. It enables users with visual impairments to create, explore, and share data visualizations. It uses enhanced visual rendering, text descriptions, tabular data, and interactive sonification. This presentation will demonstrate how to use SAS Graphics Accelerator to open the analytics lifecycle to all people.

Abstract

The analytics lifecycle starts with asking questions and then using your data to gain insights to make decisions and take action. There are many steps in this journey and several analytical tools are available for the different phases. Making the entire analytics lifecycle accessible will mean everyone can make better decisions based on data.

Data visualizations play a central role in the analytics lifecycle. How do we make an inherently visual means of communication accessible to people with visual impairments? Data visualizations provide affordances such as glance exposure which allows you to process the trend of a graph quickly. Providing a table of the data for someone to read through is hardly the same experience. Further, even the best alternative text description cannot keep up with interactive data visualizations.

SAS Graphics Accelerator is a freely available Chrome extension developed to solve these problems. It enables users with visual impairments or blindness to create, explore, and share data visualizations. It supports alternative presentations of data visualizations that include enhanced visual rendering, text descriptions, tabular data, and interactive sonification. Sonification uses non-speech audio to convey important information about the graph.

SAS Graphics Accelerator provides a laboratory feature that allows users to import data from CSV, Excel, or HTML tables found on the Web. It also provides the ability to transform maps into alternative presentations utilizing sonification.

In addition to using SAS Graphics Accelerator as a standalone tool, it is integrated with core SAS technologies to enable unparalleled access to the analytics lifecycle.

Keypoints

  1. Data visualizations can be transformed into alternative presentations that allow all users to explore them.
  2. Sonification of data visualizations provides users a new modality for understanding data.
  3. Making the analytics lifecycle accessible involves more than providing good text descriptions of graphs.

Disability Areas

Vision

Topic Areas

Accessible Educational Materials, Uncategorized, Web/Media/App Access

Speaker Bio(s)

Greg Kraus

Greg Kraus is the Director of Product Accessibility at SAS where his team is making the entire analytics lifecycle accessible through innovative solutions and practices. He has led accessibility efforts in higher education, developed accessibility testing tools, and consulted with organizations of all sizes to make their products and services accessible.

Handout(s)