VizAbility: Multimodal Accessible Data Visualization with Keyboard Navigation and Conversational Interaction

Data visualization serves as a crucial tool for communicating important information in our society. Yet, as visualizations grow more complex, they become less accessible to individuals with visual impairments. Traditional accessibility approaches like alternative text and data tables often fall short of capturing the full potential of data visualization. To bridge this gap, we introduce VizAbility, a novel multimodal accessible system that combines keyboard navigation with conventional interaction, enabling individuals with visual impairments to actively engage with and explore data visualizations. VizAbility utilizes an LLM-based pipeline, seamlessly integrating data, chart structures, user locality, and web-based information to provide comprehensive answers. Our quantitative evaluation validates the LLM-based question-and-answer pipeline, and a user study involving six participants underscores the promising potential of VizAbility's multimodal approach. We discuss how current visualization tools can integrate VizAbility to enhance the accessibility of data visualizations online.