University of Illinois (University of Illinois, School of Information Sciences)

To support accessible data curation and inclusive data visualization, Dr. JooYoung Seo at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will research the needs of professional data curators and blind patrons. In partnership with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Posit Public Benefit Corporation, the Chart2Music open-source project team, the Data Curation Network, and the National Federation of the Blind, Dr. Seo will develop a multimodal data representation system. Through needs assessments, co-design, and iterative user studies with data curators and blind patrons, the project team will develop open-source tools that can augment visual charts into touchable (braille), readable (text), and audible (sound) representations. The system can be seamlessly integrated into data curators’ reproducible workflows to equally serve people with and without visual impairments. The tools and training resources will be made available open source so the deliverables can broadly support more inclusive data visualizations into the future.