Beyond the Image: Tackling the Graphical Access Crisis for Blind and Low Vision Individuals
By Dr. Nicholas Giudice, Dr. Jenna L. Gorlewicz, and Amy Keith
The Problem
One of the biggest challenges for persons with blindness or low vision (BLV), whether they be students in the classroom, professionals in the workplace, or friends interacting through social media is the difficulty in accessing visual content through graphics.
This is a problem faced daily by Nicholas Giudice, a blind scientist working on a collaborative team to solve this ‘graphical access challenge’. “I frequently talk about this problem and why it is so hard to solve. Most sighted people have no idea how much they rely on visually based graphical content unless they engage in a thought experiment where they imagine a situation without this access, such as closing their eyes and listening to screen reader audio dictate provided alternative text (a short text description) for an image. Imagining this situation suddenly makes many things people normally do without thinking seem daunting, if not impossible.”
It turns out that graphical content is everywhere! Think of the many graphics that consume our daily lives: maps of how to access public transportation, political polls, stock market trends, weather maps, or the numerous charts and diagrams that dominate STEM textbooks. Now try to imagine getting information from these graphics without being able to see them. This is a daily reality for BLV individuals, and access to visual information, conveyed through charts, graphs, maps, and the like is one of the most pressing challenges today.
Technology has rapidly shifted to the digital space and much of what used to be conveyed through words and tables (accessible to blind folks using a screen reader) is now conveyed through graphics, which are not easily accessed non-visually. The ability (or inability) to access this graphical content often makes the difference whether or not material is able to be learned, a task performed, or data understood. So, how do you access visual content that you can’t see?
Current Practice
Current solutions for accessing high-quality content are both time and resource-intensive, often requiring manual authoring and creation. One common approach to addressing this access issue is to provide alternative text descriptions. Yet, the challenge of “a picture is worth 1000 words” is evident: what visually appears to be a simple image requires either extensive description or creation in other forms to capture the richness of the data. Thus, these descriptions are often limited and lack any real meaning (e.g., “a graph of data”), if they accompany graphics at all. Graphics can also be provided in a tactile format, such as embossing (raised dots), though this often requires a trained professional, access to specialized tools, and extensive time and cost to produce. This resource-intensive process leaves K-12 educators with extensive preparation time to create accessible formats with available resources, oftentimes needing to send out content for conversion into accessible formats 9-12 months in advance, at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars for entire textbooks. In higher education and workplaces, resources may not exist, often leaving individuals with BLV to self-select out of courses and career pathways where graphics dominate.
Impact
This lack of access to information has led to unacceptable statistics: only 15.7% of individuals with BLV earn a bachelor’s degree or higher and less than 30% of working-age individuals with BLV have full-time employment [1]. These statistics have persisted for decades and the resulting gap will continue to widen without a tractable solution as: (1) the incidence of people experiencing BLV is projected to double by 2030 owing to the aging of our population [2], [3], (2) graphics and visual media are increasingly being used as the preferred medium of information exchange, and (3) print-based content is rapidly moving to an inaccessible, digital space.
The inability for individuals with BLV to access this rich graphical content contributes to the low inclusion and lack of success of this demographic in STEM disciplines [1], [4]. To be clear, the issue here is not blindness but the lack of timely, high-quality access to critical information [5].
Inclusive Innovations
There has been decades of research and advancement in assistive technology that are working to address this challenge – from the advent of screen readers to text-to-speech tools and growing AI capabilities, and refreshable tactile displays – the quest for a solution is longstanding. Yet, despite a growing body of work and innovation, very few solutions have actually made it into the hands of users with BLV. One of the driving factors is the fragmented accessibility ecosystem that these innovations are developed within. There are two primary challenges at hand – having accessible content formats and having hardware or software that is readily available to support it. Both are required for access, yet in many cases, initiatives focus on one or the other – leaving amazing hardware innovations that have no content to support it or interactive content that works only on limited platforms. This is more than siloed work and lack of crosstalk, it is about assistive technology, know-how, and focusing only addressing parts of the problem and not the entire end-to-end pipeline.
A new U.S. National Science Foundation Phase II Convergence Accelerator initiative that our group is leading, Inclusio, seeks to address this fragmented approach. Bringing together partners from across the access ecosystem – from trusted commercial assistive technology hardware companies to emerging inclusive technology software startups and from educational publishers to teachers and paraprofessionals in our classrooms – Inclusio is developing an end-to-end software solution that brings the community together into one platform where content can be found, created, and experienced on multiple platforms. Inclusio’s software suite will allow users to search through available graphical content, upload inaccessible content to convert into an accessible format, or author new content that can have multimodal attributes (such as touch feedback or sound). The secret sauce in Inclusio is that we can make information interoperable, or available across multiple outputs – such as widely used assistive technologies or mainstream mobile and web platforms. This may sound like a small thing but it is actually very important, as most information access technology is tied to one mode of output, e.g. through language, sound, or hard copy tactile output. Inclusio is unique in that it is designed from the onset to be content and output agnostic, maximizing access by allowing people to use the information modes that work best for them and optimizing inclusion by supporting a broad range of end-users.
Call to Action
Efforts like Inclusio stand to transform how we think about inclusion and access, but it takes a village and it is imperative that individuals with BLV are involved in every step of the research, design, and development process. The most successful information access technology occurs when people who actually use it are involved from the very beginning. If this resonates with you or your lived experience, we encourage you to get involved! Make your voices heard, advocate for what is needed and what works, and drive the iterative design and development vision of new technologies like Inclusio. We believe in this lived experience as the guiding signposts that we follow in our own design and development practices, both from the first-hand input we get on our team and from potential users with BLV who we talk with and who participate in the research design process. Get in touch with us and follow us, to shape the information access technology of the future.
Follow Inclusio on LinkedIn for exciting project updates and news stories highlighting our work: https://www.linkedin.com/company/inclusiocommunity/
Submit your information to be included in project updates here: https://tinyurl.com/newsletterinclusio
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos #2235243 and 2345159. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
References
[1] National Federation of the Blind, “Statistical Facts about Blindness in the United States,” 2017. [Online]. Available: https://nfb.org/blindness-statistics.
[2] J. Wittenborn and D. Rein, “Cost of Vision Problems: The Economic Burden of Vision Loss and Eye Disorders in the U.S. Prevent Blindness America,” Prevent blindness America, 2013. [Online]. Available: www.preventblindness.org.
[3] R. R. A. Bourne et al., “Global Prevalence of Blindness and Distance and Near Vision Impairment in 2020: progress towards the Vision 2020 targets and what the future holds,” Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 60, no. 7, pp. 2317–2317, 2020.
[4] N. W. Moon, R. L. Todd, D. L. Morton, and E. Ivey, “Accommodating students with disabilities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM),” Atlanta, GA: Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access, Georgia Institute of Technology, pp. 8–21, 2012.
[5] The WebAIM Million, “The 2023 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages,” 2023. [Online]. Available: https://webaim.org/projects/million.
About the Authors
Dr. Nicholas Giudice (he/him) is Professor of Spatial Computing in the School of Computing and Information Science at the University of Maine, where he is founder and Chief Research Scientist of the VEMI Lab. He is also co-founder and Chief Research Officer of Unar Labs, a Maine-based start-up company developing bio-inspired multisensory technologies supporting inclusive information access. His research deals with spatial cognition and information access for blind and visually impaired (BVI) people, older adults, and sighted individuals in eyes-free situations. He focuses on the design and evaluation of accessible multimodal technology supporting graphical access, mapping, and navigation. He has published over 150 scientific papers in these areas, is on the editorial board of two accessibility journals, the board of directors of two blindness-related organizations, and the scientific advisory board of two information-access companies. He lives with his guide dog in Portland and Bangor Maine.
Dr. Jenna L. Gorlewicz (she/her) is an Associate Professor in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at Saint Louis University, where she holds the Gene Kranz Professorship in Engineering. Dr. Gorlewicz directs the Collaborative Haptics, Robotics, and Mechatronics (CHROME) where her research interests focus on human-centered design, haptic and multimodal interfaces, robotics, medical devices, and engineering education. She is engaged in numerous initiatives at the intersection of people and technology, harnessing use-inspired research and deep, interdisciplinary collaborations to rethink technology design and interaction. Dr. Gorlewicz was an NSF CAREER Award Recipient and has served as PI on multiple collaborative initiatives, including a current NSF Convergence Accelerator project, Inclusio. She also has a vested interest in entrepreneurship and broad societal impact and is co-founder of an educational technology company, Vital, and a medical device company, Aurenar. Her passion for research and innovation has led her into an administrative role as Associate Dean in the School of Science and Engineering at SLU which she began in 2022. Dr. Gorlewicz is a member of the ASEE Entrepreneurship & Engineering Innovation Division, Mechanical Engineering Division, and Women in Engineering Division.
Amy Keith (she/her) currently serves as the Project Manager for Inclusio, an NSF Convergence Accelerator Phase II project. She has experience working as a Graduate Research Assistant in the College for Public Health and Social Justice as well as an Intern in the Office of the Vice President for Research under the Research Development Group at Saint Louis University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Health, Society, and Populations from the University of Kentucky and a Master of Public Health degree in Epidemiology & Maternal and Child Health from Saint Louis University. Through a combination of professional and educational experiences, Amy has found a passion of managing large-scale projects that focus on community-centered solutions.
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