Dylan Cashman

New consumer devices with refreshable tactile displays promise to allow visually impaired people to analyze data through tactile representations of graphical visualizations. To understand whether results based on visual perception translate to tactile perception, we present a study replicating the formative study by Cleveland and McGill (1984) on graphical perception to tactile representations suitable for visually impaired users. To assess how tactile graphics can convey complex graphical information, we investigate the effectiveness of tactile data visualizations compared to reported results on visual graphical primitives, examining the accuracy and inference times of visually impaired versus sighted users. We find that visually impaired users interpret simpler tactile formats such as bar charts with significantly greater accuracy and speed than more complex formats like bubble charts.