Professor Nam Wook Kim addresses crowd (Ella Giere | Student Life)

Nam Wook Kim, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Boston College, spoke about his award-winning research in data visualization and online accessibility, Nov. 17. 

Around 40 people attended the seminar, hosted by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, to hear Kim talk about his research on making data visualization more accessible, especially for people with visual impairments.

Kim explained his findings that visualizations from news media, including images and graphs, are often not accessible to people with visual impairments. One issue with these visuals is a lack of alternative text, which are short textual descriptions of graphics that allow people to know what is in a graphic. 

In an interview with Student Life, Kim described the expanse of data visualizations in everyday life. “Data visualizations are almost everywhere,” he said. “Government websites [and] news media use visualizations heavily to communicate very important information about our society. This information is also very critical for blind people in order to make informed decisions about their lives.”

When visually impaired people browse the news using current screen readers, they are unable to know if a chart is even there.

“If data visualizations are not accessible, that is kind of discriminatory,” Kim said. “I don’t think [news media outlets] put a lot of effort in making charts accessible.”

Given that data visualization has become a widely used tool to convey vital information in our society, an overreliance on visuals can marginalize those with blindness or low vision by creating an information gap.

Kim explained that his research showed that this information gap extends into educational settings, including when visually impaired students take exams with reading charts. “The participants said that the exam proctor is not very good at explaining the chart,” he said. 

To help bridge this information gap, Kim created VizAbility, an online data-visualization software that uses artificial intelligence to allow visually impaired users to ask questions while using keyboard navigation. With keyboard navigation, users can use the arrow keys to better parse through data values.

Additionally in his lecture, Kim discussed how designers can make the colors mapped to a given data feature more accessible. While Kim was speaking, one audience member interjected and said, “If you’re blind, you have no reason to care about that.”

Kim pushed against the audience member’s point and said that “People do care, actually. [Research] participants mentioned they want to know what sighted people see.”

Kim also made Kori, an interface that links a portion of text to a part of a chart. Kori addresses the split-attention effect, which occurs when readers come across both text and charts in articles and must go back and forth between the figure and the corresponding text to understand each reference.

“We tried to make these interactive links between the text and the chart so that we reduce cognitive burden [that comes from] trying to figure out which part [of the text] references which part of the chart, and so on,” he said. 

During his talk and interview, Kim emphasized the importance of inclusivity.  

“Try to be inclusive,” he said to Student Life. “[The public] is a really diverse audience with different literacy levels — people have different cultural backgrounds. Different abilities.”