Making data visualizations accessible for people with disabilities remains a significant challenge in current practitioner efforts. Existing visualizations often lack an underlying navigable structure, fail to engage necessary input modalities, and rely heavily on visual-only rendering practices. These limitations exclude people with disabilities, especially users of assistive technologies. To address these challenges, we present Data Navigator: a system built on a dynamic graph structure, enabling developers to construct navigable lists, trees, graphs, and flows as well as spatial, diagrammatic, and geographic relations. Data Navigator supports a wide range of input modalities: screen reader, keyboard, speech, gesture detection, and even fabricated assistive devices. We present 3 case examples with Data Navigator, demonstrating we can provide accessible navigation structures on top of raster images, integrate with existing toolkits at scale, and rapidly develop novel prototypes. Data Navigator is a step towards making accessible data visualizations easier to design and implement.

翻译：使残障人士能够无障碍地访问数据可视化，仍是当前实践工作中的重大挑战。现有可视化通常缺乏可导航的底层结构，未能整合必要的输入模态，且严重依赖纯视觉渲染方式。这些局限将残障人士（尤其是辅助技术用户）排除在外。为应对这些挑战，我们提出"数据导航者"系统——该系统基于动态图结构构建，使开发者能够构建可导航的列表、树状图、流程图，以及空间、图表和地理关系。数据导航者支持多种输入模态：屏幕阅读器、键盘、语音、手势检测，甚至可定制的辅助设备。本文通过三个案例展示了数据导航者的应用：在光栅图像上构建无障碍导航结构、大规模集成现有工具包、以及快速开发新型原型。数据导航者旨在让无障碍数据可视化的设计与实现更加便捷。