Producing Accessible Statistics Diagrams in R

Blind people are at risk of being left behind in the information age if efforts are not made to improve the access to information that is not traditionally conveyed in text, whether that text be accessed in braille, audio, or a computer’s screen reading software. Most graphics summarise a scene or some aspect of data that the author hopes will inform their audience; good statistical graphics are commonly used to great effect for the sighted world, but are practically useless to a blind audience. Our work aims to provide an accessible way for blind users to easily, efficiently, and most importantly accurately, explore and query the data contained in diagrams such as bar charts, box plots, time series, and many more. We employ the statistical software environment R to compute rich semantics for these diagrams and make them web accessible by supporting screen reading and interactive exploration.