  Web-based data visualizations have become very popular for exploring data and
communicating insights. Newspapers, journals, and reports regularly publish
visualizations to tell compelling stories with data. Unfortunately, most
visualizations are inaccessible to readers with visual impairments. For many
charts on the web, there are no accompanying alternative (alt) texts, and even
if such texts exist they do not adequately describe important insights from
charts. To address the problem, we first interviewed 15 blind users to
understand their challenges and requirements for reading data visualizations.
Based on the insights from these interviews, we developed SeeChart, an
interactive tool that automatically deconstructs charts from web pages and then
converts them to accessible visualizations for blind people by enabling them to
hear the chart summary as well as to interact through data points using the
keyboard. Our evaluation with 14 blind participants suggests the efficacy of
SeeChart in understanding key insights from charts and fulfilling their
information needs while reducing their required time and cognitive burden.
