My name is Matt Butler and I'm presenting this work on behalf of my colleagues listed,
all from Monash University in Melbourne Australia.
From where i'm presenting in Melbourne I acknowledge traditional owners of the lands,
the Wurundjeri people, and would like to pay my respects to their elders past and present.
This is a quick overview of our work of a systematic literature review of research
into touch-based accessible graphics over the last decade.
We went into this review trying to understand the current landscape of work in this area.
The past decade was chosen as we felt it showed a distinct shift in work and the embracing of many
new emerging technologies as well as producing a sizeable body of work to review. We were keen to
understand how things changed over the last decade, the dominant methods and most importantly to identify
key gaps and challenges. That's one of the main contributions that a work like this can feed back
into the research community. In defining the scope the focus was on a novel touch-based graphic work
either in production, presentation or interaction. So that meant traditional tactile graphics would
only be included if part of a comparative study or with a novel production technique. Touch was
also vital and other modalities such as sound were only included if touch was the dominant
interaction strategy. Also of importance was the work focused on use by the blind
and low vision community. If it was solely for other purposes then it wasn't included.
So using this aforementioned scope we had a set of inclusion criteria. We then identified works
in two ways. Firstly by reviewing about a dozen key conferences and journals that are well known
for their work in assisted tech, as well as key industry journals. We also had a defined keyword
search that let us find work outside of these venues. An inclusive approach meant we identified
352 papers which we then reviewed and analyzed based on criteria you can read in the paper.
59 papers were removed from the set by mutual agreement for being outside of scope leaving a
final corpus of 292 papers. What's following is a quick overview of some of the findings. With regard
to demographics, the papers were from 97 different venues with 641 unique authors. While
this is encouraging, that the work in the area is being conducted by significant number of researchers and
in a wide variety of venues, the long tail is of some concern whereby the majority of papers
are one-off works with no follow-up or refinement. This may suggest that a lot of work takes place
that does not lead to community use. Regarding the types of diagrams, represented most were maps
for orientation and mobility use or STEM materials and education. What was very underrepresented
were diagrams for use in the workplace and indeed the work context was in very few papers.
Of the primary contributions of the work, work was split reasonably evenly between new uses
of existing tech, new production methods or new presentation methods with also a strong
representation of new interaction approaches. Significant gap was that there were very few
comparative studies whereby new technologies were really evaluated against other tech and best
practice.This is both an opportunity for future work and would strengthen practical outcomes.
Our speculation regarding technologies proved to be correct with maker type technologies like
3d printing and low cost electronics for use in audio label dominating they strengthened around
2015, with force feedback devices dropping off considerably around that time. We were very keen
to understand the nature of end user involvement across the work as well. When considering full
papers in the corpus we were encouraged that just over 85 percent of works had the involvement of
end user participants. This however was mostly in evaluation with little involvement in the design
or development stages which is a significant gap. Also of note where the blind end users were over
represented in comparison to those who have low vision which is another gap. Similarly there was
very little involvement by sector professionals such as transcribers or O&M experts and the like.
From the analysis a number of key opportunities for future work emerge. First was in broadening
of application areas. As previously mentioned there was little research focused on workplace context
and we feel this is a significant gap that could also help address inequities in the workplace.
Secondly we believe that the use of comparative studies could be strengthened
to better understand the potential practical implication of work that's being undertaken.
Related to this there's also the need for more studies to conduct in-situ testing and this could
add extra validity to evaluation and strengthen adoption of new technologies and approaches.
Finally while involvement by the blind and low vision community in general is fairly strong
all participants could be more heavily involved in the design and development of new approaches
and also there should be greater inclusion by those with low vision. To conclude it's important
to point out that to support this study in the accessible graphics community more broadly we
have an accessible online repository of the works reviewed, a picture of which is seen on the screen.
Based on the work of Kucher, Paradis and Kerren with Sentiment Viz, we have our own accessible
graphics repository AGRep that's had tweaks to improve accessibility and to share with the
wider community. Details are in the paper and the URL is in the slides. Thank you to all whose
work we reviewed and we hope that there will continue to be work strong work in the future.