Supplementary Materials for ASSETS’21 Experience Report
Interdependent Variables: Remotely Designing Tactile Graphics for an Accessible Workflow
Overview
These supplementary materials offer examples of tactile graphics that co-authors Lilian de Greef and Cynthia Bennett created while developing their accessible workflow around data representations. Our full set of supplementary materials contains this document and two folders: a folder titled "EmbossableGraphics" containing TactileView files of embossable graphics, and a folder titled "ImagesForHTMLFile" containing images for the file you're reading right now. In the next section of this document, we share an overview for how to emboss the graphics in "EmbossableGraphics". We subsequently share photographs of example reference sheets and tactile graphics we developed, organized by handmade then embossed materials.
Embossing the Tactile Graphics
The "EmbossableGraphics" folder contains graphics we created, both for tactile reference sheets and for data representations like the ones detailed later in this document. These files require TactileView software to use and are specifically designed for the ViewPlus Columbia 2 embosser and 11.5 x 11 inch paper. They may not be compatible with other embossers. When embossing these graphics, refer to the ViewPlus Columbia's User Manual. Remember to set the embosser to use 11.5 x 11 paper, and Tactile Graphics (as opposed to text). Also remember to adjust printer settings to use the VP Columbia printer, "Actual Size" (instead of "shrink"), and "Best" graphics quality (which is under printer properties / Tiger tab). Most of the graphics were designed for landscape orientation.
Handmade Materials
Handmade Tactile Reference Sheet
As discussed in the report, we created a reference sheet of different tactile materials. Figure 1, below, offers a larger image of this reference sheet. Figure 2 shows the backside of this reference sheet.
Figure 1: A handmade tactile reference sheet featuring 24 different materials for creating different textures. For some materials, the reference sheet includes examples of both applying one layer and two or more layers.Figure 2: The back side of the handmade tactile reference sheet, featuring different styles of lines created with puff paint.
Handmade Tactile Graphics
In this section, we showcase a subset of our handmade tactile graphics. One is a tactile version of Anscombe’s Quartet (Figure 3), a classic example of how data tables or statistical summaries cannot replace the utility of graphical data representations [2]. While the basic statistics for the data in these four charts like the mean x value or correlation are nearly identical, graphical representations quickly reveal different underlying patterns.
Figure 3: Tactile representations of Anscombe’s quartet [2]. The data in each chart have identical mean and variance for x values, and nearly identical mean and variance of y values, correlation, linear regression, and coefficient of determination.
Figure 4 shows how graphical representations can highlight different properties of the same data—another example of how important it is to use tactile graphics in our workflow instead of relying on data tables.
Figure 4: A set of two tactile grouped bar charts and their legend, based on figures in [3]. Both charts represent the same underlying data, but the different ways they organize the data make different patterns stand out: one of the most salient features of the first chart is a comparison between female and male salaries, which is more difficult to perceive in the second chart. Meanwhile, the second chart makes it easier to rank and compare the relative salary levels for different industries, which is more difficult to perceive in the first chart.
In our report, we highlight how graphical representations can offer more nuance that verbal descriptions. One example is how accessing the graphic of a line chart described as “volatile” created an “ah hah” moment for understanding just how volatile the line is, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Figure 5 shows two contrasting examples of such line charts.
Figure 5: Two tactile line charts based on figures in [5]: one with high volatility and one with low volatility.
Verbal descriptions alone also could not feasibly communicate all the rich details of complex charts without them becoming too lengthy or complicated. Figures 6 and 7 showcase examples of charts with more complexity than the above figures. Each member of our team, both sighted and blind, contributed different observations on patterns or specific data points when we referenced this chart during our brainstorms and explorations.
Figure 6: An example of a chart with more complexity: a tactile stacked bar chart based on a Screen Time chart in iOS Settings, using fictitious data. It represents the four series with glitter washi tape, sports tape, soft velcro tape, and packing tape.
Figure 7: Another chart with more complexity: a tactile multi-series line chart and its legend, based on a figure in [6].
We also report that handmade tactile graphics can express some charts more clearly than modern-day embossers. One such example is the heat map in Figure 8.
Figure 8: A tactile heat map based on [1], photographed from two different angles. It uses layers of thick medical tape to map different three-dimensional heights to the value in each of the heat map’s cells, finished with a layer of moleskin padding (which is another type of medical tape) to reduce friction for gliding fingers across the surface.
Embossed Materials
The figures in this section represent a subset of the graphics we embossed, each pictured with both a digital representation and a photograph of the embossed output. Each of the figures (and more) are also available through the EmbossableGraphics.pdf file included in the supplementary materials.
The embosser punches dots into paper based on where the digital representation has gray pixels, using the tallest dot height for black pixels and subsequently shorter dots for lighter shades of gray. The Embosser ignores blue pixels, which enables annotating the files with print text.
Embossed Tactile Reference Sheets
We created multiple reference sheets that compare different lines, fills, and dot heights (Figures 9 and 10).
Figure 9: Top: an embossed grid of solid and dotted lines with different widths and dot heights. Bottom: a grid of the same set of shapes featuring 90-degree, angled, and curved edges, but with different combinations of border and fill dot heights.
Figure 10: Two more embossed tactile reference sheets. Top: a set of filled rectangles touching each other for tactile reference of every possible combination of adjacent dots heights. Middle: different sizes of filled and hollow circles, as well as lines at different angles. Bottom: a test for overlapping areas of one dot height with markings of another dot height.
Embossed Tactile Graphics
Figures 11–12 show a few examples of our embossed tactile graphics. Figure 12, in particular, is an example of making two variations based on the same chart, which is much faster and easier to do with an embosser than making tactile graphics by hand.
Figure 11: Examples of embossed tactile graphics: a line chart and a bar chart.
Figure 12: Two embossed scatterplots based on a subset of the Palmer Penguins dataset [4]. Both show flipper length versus body mass for the same penguin data, except that the second chart also marks the species associated with each data point. Modifying the digital file of first chart into the second chart is much faster than re-creating them by hand.
References
2D Histogram Heatmap. Retrieved June 22, 2021 from https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/examples/rect_binned_heatmap.html
Francis J. Anscombe. 1973. Graphs in Statistical Analysis. The American Statistician27, 1 (1973). DOI: 10.1080/00031305.1973.10478966
Richard Burns, Sandra Carberry, and Stephanie Elzer. 2010. Visual and Spatial Factors in a Bayesian Reasoning Framework for the Recognition of Intended Messages in Grouped Bar Charts. Visual Representations and Reasoning.
Priscilla S. Moraes, Sandra Carberry, and Kathleen Mccoy. 2013. Providing access to the high-level content of line graphs from online popular media. Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility - W4A 13 (2013). DOI: 10.1145/2461121.2461123
Jina Suh, Eric Horvitz, Ryen W. White, and Tim Althoff. 2021. Population-Scale Study of Human Needs During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (2021). DOI: 10.1145/3437963.3441788