Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse
Computational Linguistics
Audiograf: a diagram-reader for the blind
Assets '96 Proceedings of the second annual ACM conference on Assistive technologies
Computer graphics for the blind
ACM SIGCAPH Computers and the Physically Handicapped
The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine
WWW7 Proceedings of the seventh international conference on World Wide Web 7
Constructing sonified haptic line graphs for the blind student: first steps
Assets '00 Proceedings of the fourth international ACM conference on Assistive technologies
Comparing Two Haptic Interfaces for Multimodal Graph Rendering
HAPTICS '02 Proceedings of the 10th Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems
Web-Based Haptic Applications for Blind People to Create Virtual Graphs
HAPTICS '03 Proceedings of the 11th Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems (HAPTICS'03)
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Exploring the use of structured musical stimuli to communicate simple diagrams: the role of context
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Indexing and exploiting a discourse history to generate context-sensitive explanations
HLT '93 Proceedings of the workshop on Human Language Technology
Programmer-focused website accessibility evaluations
Proceedings of the 7th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
PLUMB: displaying graphs to the blind using an active auditory interface
Proceedings of the 7th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
A Model of Perceptual Task Effort for Bar Charts and its Role in Recognizing Intention
User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction
Information graphics: an untapped resource for digital libraries
SIGIR '06 Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
SoundBar: exploiting multiple views in multimodal graph browsing
Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: changing roles
ACL '05 Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Improving accessibility to statistical graphs: the iGraph-Lite system
Proceedings of the 9th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
Automated tactile graphics translation: in the field
Proceedings of the 9th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
GraSSML: accessible smart schematic diagrams for all
Universal Access in the Information Society
Unsupervised Graph-basedWord Sense Disambiguation Using Measures of Word Semantic Similarity
ICSC '07 Proceedings of the International Conference on Semantic Computing
Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
Making Microsoft Excel™: multimodal presentation of charts
Proceedings of the 11th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
A probabilistic framework for recognizing intention in information graphics
IJCAI'05 Proceedings of the 19th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence
Generating textual summaries of bar charts
INLG '08 Proceedings of the Fifth International Natural Language Generation Conference
Interactive SIGHT into information graphics
Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)
A discourse-aware graph-based content-selection framework
INLG '10 Proceedings of the 6th International Natural Language Generation Conference
Evaluating a tool for improving accessibility to charts and graphs
Proceedings of the 12th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
Recognizing the intended message of line graphs
Diagrams'10 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Diagrammatic representation and inference
Getting computers to see information graphics so users do not have to
ISMIS'05 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Foundations of Intelligent Systems
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
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Information graphics, such as bar charts and line graphs, are an important component of many articles from popular media. The majority of such graphics have an intention (a high-level message) to communicate to the graph viewer. Since the intended message of a graphic is often not repeated in the accompanying text, graphics together with the textual segments contribute to the overall purpose of an article and cannot be ignored. Unfortunately, these visual displays are provided in a format which is not readily accessible to everyone. For example, individuals with sight impairments who use screen readers to listen to documents have limited access to the graphics. This article presents a new accessibility tool, the Interactive SIGHT (Summarizing Information GrapHics Textually) system, that is intended to enable visually impaired users to access the knowledge that one would gain from viewing information graphics found on the web. The current system, which is implemented as a browser extension that works on simple bar charts, can be invoked by a user via a keystroke combination while navigating the web. Once launched, Interactive SIGHT first provides a brief summary that conveys the underlying intention of a bar chart along with the chart's most significant and salient features, and then produces history-aware follow-up responses to provide further information about the chart upon request from the user. We present two user studies that were conducted with sighted and visually impaired users to determine how effective the initial summary and follow-up responses are in conveying the informational content of bar charts, and to evaluate how easy it is to use the system interface. The evaluation results are promising and indicate that the system responses are well-structured and enable visually impaired users to answer key questions about bar charts in an easy-to-use manner. Post-experimental interviews revealed that visually impaired participants were very satisfied with the system offering different options to access the content of a chart to meet their specific needs and that they would use Interactive SIGHT if it was publicly available so as not to have to ignore graphics on the web. Being a language based assistive technology designed to compensate for the lack of sight, our work paves the road for a stronger acceptance of natural language interfaces to graph interpretation that we believe will be of great benefit to the visually impaired community.