Tac-tiles: multimodal pie charts for visually impaired users

Tac-tiles is an accessible interface that allows visually impaired users to browse graphical information using tactile and audio feedback. The system uses a graphics tablet which is augmented with a tangible overlay tile to guide user exploration. Dynamic feedback is provided by a tactile pin-array at the fingertips, and through speech/non-speech audio cues. In designing the system, we seek to preserve the affordances and metaphors of traditional, low-tech teaching media for the blind, and combine this with the benefits of a digital representation. Traditional tangible media allow rapid, non-sequential access to data, promote easy and unambiguous access to resources such as axes and gridlines, allow the use of external memory, and preserve visual conventions, thus promoting collaboration with sighted colleagues. A prototype system was evaluated with visually impaired users, and recommendations for multimodal design were derived

A review of data visualization: opportunities in manufacturing sequence management.

Data visualization now benefits from developments in technologies that offer innovative ways of presenting complex data. Potentially these have widespread application in communicating the complex information domains typical of manufacturing sequence management environments for global enterprises. In this paper the authors review the visualization functionalities, techniques and applications reported in literature, map these to manufacturing sequence information presentation requirements and identify the opportunities available and likely development paths. Current leading-edge practice in dynamic updating and communication with suppliers is not being exploited in manufacturing sequence management; it could provide significant benefits to manufacturing business. In the context of global manufacturing operations and broad-based user communities with differing needs served by common data sets, tool functionality is generally ahead of user application

TreemapBar: Visualizing additional dimensions of data in bar chart

Bar chart is a very common and simple graph that ismainly used to visualize simple x, y plots of data for numerical comparisons by partitioning the categorical data values into bars and typically limited to operate on highly aggregated dataset. In today's growing complexity of business data with multi dimensional attributes using bar chart itself is not sufficient to deal with the representation of such business dataset and it also not utilizes the screen space efficiently. Nevertheless, bar chart is still useful because of its shape create strong visual attention to users at first glance than other visualization techniques. In this article, we present a treemap bar chart + tablelens interaction technique that combines the treemap and bar chart visualizations with a tablelens based zooming technique that allows users to view the detail of a particular bar when the density of bars increases. In our approach, the capability of the original bar chart and treemaps for representing complex business data is enhanced and the utilization of display space is also optimized. © 2009 IEEE

Generating Explanatory Captions for Information Graphics

Graphical presentations can be used to communicate information in relational data sets succinctly and effectively. However, novel graphical presentations about numerous attributes and their relationships are often difficult to understand completely until explained. Automatically generated graphical presentations must therefore either be limited to simple, conventional ones, or risk incomprehensibility. One way of alleviating this problem is to design graphical presentation systems that can work in conjunction with a natural language generator to produce "explanatory captions." This paper presents three strategies for generating explanatory captions to accompany information graphics based on: (1) a representation of the structure of the graphical presentation (2) a framework for identifyingthe perceptual complexity of graphical elements, and (3) the structure of the data expressed in the graphic. We describe an implemented system and illustrate how it is used to generate explanatory cap..