Shehnaz Islam
DARE Project: Towards building accessible data visualizations
Program(s) of Study: Information Technology
Project Supervisor: Enamul Hoque Prince
This project allowed me to gain hands-on experience in Information Visualization, Artificial Intelligence, and User Interface Design. I learned how to design, develop and test an interface that would help visually impaired users effectively interpret graphs, thus contributing to the advancements in AI and the community. I also learned how to apply AI tools and advanced deep learning methods for summarizing charts; I have no doubt that these skills have given me the valuable experience require for my future career.
Project Description:
Information visualization has become very popular for exploring and understanding a large amount of data. However, people with visual impairment are often unable to read charts due to lack of accessibility. Unfortunately, despite the growing popularity of visualizations, there has been a lack of research on inclusive and accessible visualization design. The overarching goal of this project is to use automatically generated captions and interactive techniques to help visually impaired people to make sense of the charts. Towards achieving this goal, we will focus on the following objectives: 1) We will build a dataset of several hundreds of different kinds of charts in image format (e.g. bar charts, pie charts, line charts, scatterplots). 2) We will train artificial intelligence methods on the collected dataset to automatically extract the underlying chart data from images. 3) We will design user interface that allows user to interact with chart data using mouse, gesture and speech as well as other possible modalities. This research project has the potential to significantly advance the emerging area of accessible data visualization with a focus on enabling people who are visually impaired or have cognitive difficulties to comprehend charts and perform analytical tasks through speech. Furthermore, our research will significantly improve the ability of professionals ranging from data scientists to business analysts, to customer support analysts, to healthcare analysts, in analyzing data and making complex decisions. Finally, this project will provide educational experience and research training for undergraduate students in information visualization, AI, data science, and analytics which are in high demand in a large variety of fields in Canada and abroad.The Dean’s Award for Research Excellence (DARE) - Undergraduate enables our students to meaningfully engage in research projects supervised by LA&PS faculty members. Find out more about DARE.