Trevor
Dsouza
Interaction Designer
Tata Consultancy Services, India
Trevor D’souza is a UX designer at TCS with a total of about 7 years of work experience. His career cuts across various disciplines like visual design, development and now user experience design. At the Product Experience CoE at TCS he helps various other product teams make their products more user friendly and delightful. This involves a healthy mix of research as well as hands on design and consulting. Additionally, he also functions as a SME (Subject Matter Expert) in the field of data visualization. He helps teams serve large amounts of data in simple, easy to consume interfaces.
Track 4: Broader impact & change through design
Accessible Data Visualizations – Helping everyone visualize datasets
“Data Visualization” as the name suggest is a “Visual” element. It makes data easy to access, process and consume by displaying it graphically. While these data visualizations are effective in making datasets meaningful, they have one limitation. They depend entirely on graphical elements to depict data, and hence exclude anyone with visual impairments. The general approach with visual impairment is to allow users to use a different channel or sense for information consumption. This is normally done via sound. However, in the case of data visualization, reading out data is ineffective as the entire dataset needs to be read out. The user too, needs to hear and retain each data point to derive insights. This would be an extremely tedious task at best. This approach is equivalent to displaying a table instead of a visualization. Hence, a different approach is needed where users can not only access data, but also derive insights through a more natural, comforting form of interaction.
This talk explores methods and principles of designing accessible data visualizations. These visualizations will enable all users to access the same insight from the same pool of data, irrespective of any kind of visual impairment
they might have.
Track 4: Broader impact & change through design
Three key takeaways
1. Challenges users with visual impairment face when accessing data visualizations
2. Methods of effectively designing visualizations that all users, irrespective of any impairment are able to access consistently
3. Principles and guidelines that provide direction while designing any kind of accessible information visualization for any kind of impairment
