Three Modalities, Two Design Probes, One Prototype, and No Vision: Experience-Based Co-Design of a Multi-modal 3D Data Visualization Tool

When sighted practitioners author accessible data visualizations, they build navigation structures (the nodes, edges, and input bindings that govern how assistive technologies traverse an interface) entirely in code, with no visual representation. Without a representation to react to, practitioners cannot develop judgment about what makes navigation good or bad, and the quality ceiling of non-visual experiences is set by the absence of a feedback loop. We address this problem through longitudinal co-design with practitioners across cartography, design systems, and open-source visualization, and make three contributions. First, we introduce an Inspector that renders navigation graphs as interactive node-link diagrams, and a Dimensions API that expresses navigation in terms of data dimensions rather than explicit graph construction. Second we present Skeleton, a direct-manipulation authoring environment in which the properties of an accessible navigation structure are translated into visual representations authors can observe and manipulate. Key techniques include a dual-view editor that simultaneously shows the system's navigation model and the end user's spatial experience, a scaffolding engine that automates spatial node placement by repurposing a visualization rendering pipeline, a live label-template editor with real-time screen-reader-output preview, and a testing mode that makes traversal sequence visually trackable. Third, we evaluate Skeleton through an in-situ study with 8 practitioners across visualization design, engineering, and research. Making navigation structure visible changed how practitioners engaged with accessible design: they reconsidered the architecture of their own visualizations, attended to a broader range of input modalities, and shifted from treating accessibility as a compliance task to treating it as a design problem. (abstract shortened for arxiv)

Virtual worlds now host classrooms, meetings, conferences, shops, and social venues, and nearly every interaction they expose assumes a user who can scan a three-dimensional scene, follow avatars, and read floating panels. Blind and visually impaired (BVI) users are left with assistive tools that each solve one task in isolation: naming an object, reading text, describing a scene, or planning a route. A live virtual room defeats that model: obstacles, speakers, gestures, chat, slides, and notifications arrive together, and a tool that narrates all of them trades a visual barrier for an auditory one. This paper presents MetaBlind, an architecture that distributes nonvisual access across eight specialized agents, spanning perception, navigation, social and object interaction, communication, safety and trust, memory, and personalization, and that places an Accessibility Orchestrator between those agents and the user. Agents publish candidate information into a shared accessibility context instead of speaking to the user directly. The orchestrator scores each candidate on safety relevance, goal relevance, urgency, confidence, user relevance, and estimated listening load, then releases only the items it judges relevant at that moment through speech, structured audio, or haptic output. We give the selection step a formal statement, specify the orchestration cycle as an algorithm, and define an evaluation protocol against a single-agent assistant. MetaBlind is reported at the design stage, with no prototype measurement or user study, and the protocol states which outcomes would support the design and which would refute it.

As social virtual reality (VR) grows more popular, addressing accessibility for blind and low vision (BLV) users is increasingly critical. Researchers have proposed an AI "sighted guide" to help users navigate VR and answer their questions, but it has not been studied with users. To address this gap, we developed a large language model (LLM)-powered guide and studied its use with 16 BLV participants in virtual environments with confederates posing as other users. We found that when alone, participants treated the guide as a tool, but treated it companionably around others, giving it nicknames, rationalizing its mistakes with its appearance, and encouraging confederate-guide interaction. Our work furthers understanding of guides as a versatile method for VR accessibility and presents design recommendations for future guides.