arXiv subjects

Jonathan Zong

Publications and source records attributed to Jonathan Zong.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Using Real Names of Disabled Participant-Contributors to Practice Citational Justice in Accessibility

In accessibility research involving human subjects, researchers conventionally anonymize their research participants to protect privacy. However, a lack of intentionality about who to publicly acknowledge for intellectual contributions to research can lead to the erasure of disabled individuals' work and knowledge. In this paper, I propose identifying disabled research participants by name (with consent) as a practice of citational justice. I share observations from examples of this practice in accessible visualization research, and offer considerations for when it may be appropriate to de-anonymize. Intentional practices of citation offer researchers an opportunity to acknowledge the expertise and intellectual contributions of disabled people in our communities.

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arXiv2025

Semantic Scaffolding: Augmenting Textual Structures with Domain-Specific Groupings for Accessible Data Exploration

Drawing connections between interesting groupings of data and their real-world meaning is an important, yet difficult, part of encountering a new dataset. A lay reader might see an interesting visual pattern in a chart but lack the domain expertise to explain its meaning. Or, a reader might be familiar with a real-world concept but struggle to express it in terms of a dataset's fields. In response, we developed semantic scaffolding, a technique for using domain-specific information from large language models (LLMs) to identify, explain, and formalize semantically meaningful data groupings. We present groupings in two ways: as semantic bins, which segment a field into domain-specific intervals and categories; and data highlights, which annotate subsets of data records with their real-world meaning. We demonstrate and evaluate this technique in Olli, an accessible visualization tool that exemplifies tensions around explicitly defining groupings while respecting the agency of readers to conduct independent data exploration. We conducted a study with 15 blind and low-vision (BLV) users and found that readers used semantic scaffolds to quickly understand the meaning of the data, but were often also critically aware of its influence on their interpretation.

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arXiv2025

Tactile Vega-Lite: Rapidly Prototyping Tactile Charts with Smart Defaults

Tactile charts are essential for conveying data to blind and low vision (BLV) readers but are difficult for designers to construct. Non-expert designers face barriers to entry due to complex guidelines, while experts struggle with fragmented and time-consuming workflows that involve extensive customization. Inspired by formative interviews with expert tactile graphics designers, we created Tactile Vega-Lite (TVL): an extension of Vega-Lite that offers tactile-specific abstractions and synthesizes existing guidelines into a series of smart defaults. Predefined stylistic choices enable non-experts to produce guideline-compliant tactile charts quickly. Expert users can override defaults to tailor customizations for their intended audience. In a user study with 12 tactile graphics creators, we show that Tactile Vega-Lite enhances flexibility and consistency by automating tasks like adjusting spacing and translating braille while accelerating iterations through pre-defined textures and line styles. Through expert critique, we also learn more about tactile chart design best practices and design decisions.

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arXiv2024

Umwelt: Accessible Structured Editing of Multimodal Data Representations

We present Umwelt, an authoring environment for interactive multimodal data representations. In contrast to prior approaches, which center the visual modality, Umwelt treats visualization, sonification, and textual description as coequal representations: they are all derived from a shared abstract data model, such that no modality is prioritized over the others. To simplify specification, Umwelt evaluates a set of heuristics to generate default multimodal representations that express a dataset's functional relationships. To support smoothly moving between representations, Umwelt maintains a shared query predicated that is reified across all modalities -- for instance, navigating the textual description also highlights the visualization and filters the sonification. In a study with 5 blind / low-vision expert users, we found that Umwelt's multimodal representations afforded complementary overview and detailed perspectives on a dataset, allowing participants to fluidly shift between task- and representation-oriented ways of thinking.

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arXiv2023

Beyond Dark Patterns: A Concept-Based Framework for Ethical Software Design

Current dark pattern research tells designers what not to do, but how do they know what to do? In contrast to prior approaches that focus on patterns to avoid and their underlying principles, we present a framework grounded in positive expected behavior against which deviations can be judged. To articulate this expected behavior, we use concepts -- abstract units of functionality that compose applications. We define a design as dark when its concepts violate users' expectations, and benefit the application provider at the user's expense. Though user expectations can differ, users tend to develop common expectations as they encounter the same concepts across multiple applications, which we can record in a concept catalog as standard concepts. We evaluate our framework and concept catalog through three studies, illustrating their ability to describe existing dark patterns, evaluate nuanced designs, and document common application functionality.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

"Customization is Key": Reconfigurable Content Tokens for Accessible Data Visualizations

Customization is crucial for making visualizations accessible to blind and low-vision (BLV) people with widely-varying needs. But what makes for usable or useful customization? We identify four design goals for how BLV people should be able to customize screen-reader-accessible visualizations: presence, or what content is included; verbosity, or how concisely content is presented; ordering, or how content is sequenced; and, duration, or how long customizations are active. To meet these goals, we model a customization as a sequence of content tokens, each with a set of adjustable properties. We instantiate our model by extending Olli, an open-source accessible visualization toolkit, with a settings menu and command box for persistent and ephemeral customization respectively. Through a study with 13 BLV participants, we find that customization increases the ease of identifying and remembering information. However, customization also introduces additional complexity, making it more helpful for users familiar with similar tools.

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arXiv2022

Animated Vega-Lite: Unifying Animation with a Grammar of Interactive Graphics

We present Animated Vega-Lite, a set of extensions to Vega-Lite that model animated visualizations as time-varying data queries. In contrast to alternate approaches for specifying animated visualizations, which prize a highly expressive design space, Animated Vega-Lite prioritizes unifying animation with the language's existing abstractions for static and interactive visualizations to enable authors to smoothly move between or combine these modalities. Thus, to compose animation with static visualizations, we represent time as an encoding channel. Time encodings map a data field to animation keyframes, providing a lightweight specification for animations without interaction. To compose animation and interaction, we also represent time as an event stream; Vega-Lite selections, which provide dynamic data queries, are now driven not only by input events but by timer ticks as well. We evaluate the expressiveness of our approach through a gallery of diverse examples that demonstrate coverage over taxonomies of both interaction and animation. We also critically reflect on the conceptual affordances and limitations of our contribution by interviewing five expert developers of existing animation grammars. These reflections highlight the key motivating role of in-the-wild examples, and identify three central tradeoffs: the language design process, the types of animated transitions supported, and how the systems model keyframes.

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arXiv2022

Rich Screen Reader Experiences for Accessible Data Visualization

Current web accessibility guidelines ask visualization designers to support screen readers via basic non-visual alternatives like textual descriptions and access to raw data tables. But charts do more than summarize data or reproduce tables; they afford interactive data exploration at varying levels of granularity -- from fine-grained datum-by-datum reading to skimming and surfacing high-level trends. In response to the lack of comparable non-visual affordances, we present a set of rich screen reader experiences for accessible data visualization and exploration. Through an iterative co-design process, we identify three key design dimensions for expressive screen reader accessibility: structure, or how chart entities should be organized for a screen reader to traverse; navigation, or the structural, spatial, and targeted operations a user might perform to step through the structure; and, description, or the semantic content, composition, and verbosity of the screen reader's narration. We operationalize these dimensions to prototype screen-reader-accessible visualizations that cover a diverse range of chart types and combinations of our design dimensions. We evaluate a subset of these prototypes in a mixed-methods study with 13 blind and low vision readers. Our findings demonstrate that these designs help users conceptualize data spatially, selectively attend to data of interest at different levels of granularity, and experience control and agency over their data analysis process. An accessible HTML version of this paper is available at: http://vis.csail.mit.edu/pubs/rich-screen-reader-vis-experiences.

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arXiv2020

Representing Real-Time Multi-User Collaboration in Visualizations

Establishing common ground and maintaining shared awareness amongst participants is a key challenge in collaborative visualization. For real-time collaboration, existing work has primarily focused on synchronizing constituent visualizations - an approach that makes it difficult for users to work independently, or selectively attend to their collaborators' activity. To address this gap, we introduce a design space for representing synchronous multi-user collaboration in visualizations defined by two orthogonal axes: situatedness, or whether collaborators' interactions are overlaid on or shown outside of a user's view, and specificity, or whether collaborators are depicted through abstract, generic representations or through specific means customized for the given visualization. We populate this design space with a variety of examples including generic and custom synchronized cursors, and user legends that collect these cursors together or reproduce collaborators' views as thumbnails. To build common ground, users can interact with these representations by peeking to take a quick look at a collaborator's view, tracking to follow along with a collaborator in real-time, and forking to independently explore the visualization based on a collaborator's work. We present a reference implementation of a wrapper library that converts interactive Vega-Lite charts into collaborative visualizations. We find that our approach affords synchronous collaboration across an expressive range of visual designs and interaction techniques.

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arXiv2020

Lyra 2: Designing Interactive Visualizations by Demonstration

Recent graphical interfaces offer direct manipulation mechanisms for authoring visualizations, but are largely restricted to static output. To author interactive visualizations, users must instead turn to textual specification; but, such approaches impose a higher technical burden than their graphical counterparts. To bridge this gap, we introduce interaction design by demonstration: a novel method for authoring interaction techniques via direct manipulation. Users perform an interaction (e.g., button clicks, drags, or key presses) directly on the visualization they are editing. The system interprets this performance using a set of heuristics, and produces suggestions of possible interaction designs. Heuristics account for properties of the interaction (e.g., target and event type) as well as the visualization (e.g., mark and scale types, and multiple views). Interaction design suggestions are displayed as thumbnails; users can preview and test these suggestions, iteratively refine them through additional demonstrations, and finally apply and customize them via property inspectors. To evaluate our approach, we instantiate it in Lyra, an existing visualization design environment. We demonstrate its expressive extent with a gallery of diverse examples, and evaluate its usability through a first-use study and via an analysis of its cognitive dimensions. We find that, in Lyra, interaction design by demonstration enables users to rapidly express a wide range of interactive visualizations.

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