ASSETS ’25, Denver, CO, USA

CHI ’25, Yokohama, Japan

Current dark pattern research tells designers what not to do, but how do they know what to do? In contrast to prior approaches that focus on patterns to avoid and their underlying principles, we present a framework grounded in positive expected behavior against which deviations can be judged. To articulate this expected behavior, we use concepts—abstract units of functionality that compose applications. We define a design as dark when its concepts violate users’ expectations, and benefit the application provider at the user’s expense. Though user expectations can differ, users tend to develop common expectations as they encounter the same concepts across multiple applications, which we can record in a concept catalog as standard concepts. We evaluate our framework and concept catalog through three studies, illustrating their ability to describe existing dark patterns, evaluate nuanced designs, and document common application functionality.

Customization is crucial for making visualizations accessible to blind and low-vision (BLV) people with widely-varying needs. But what makes for usable or useful customization? We identify four design goals for how BLV people should be able to customize screen-reader-accessible visualizations: presence, or what content is included; verbosity, or how concisely content is presented; ordering, or how content is sequenced; and, duration, or how long customizations are active. To meet these goals, we model a customization as a sequence of content tokens, each with a set of adjustable properties. We instantiate our model by extending Olli, an open-source accessible visualization toolkit, with a settings menu and command box for persistent and ephemeral customization respectively. Through a study with 13 BLV participants, we find that customization increases the ease of identifying and remembering information. However, customization also introduces additional complexity, making it more helpful for users familiar with similar tools.

We present Umwelt, an authoring environment for interactive multimodal data representations. In contrast to prior approaches, which center the visual modality, Umwelt treats visualization, sonification, and textual description as coequal representations: they are all derived from a shared abstract data model, such that no modality is prioritized over the others. To simplify specification, Umwelt evaluates a set of heuristics to generate default multimodal representations that express a dataset’s functional relationships. To support smoothly moving between representations, Umwelt maintains a shared query predicated that is reified across all modalities — for instance, navigating the textual description also highlights the visualization and filters the sonification. In a study with 5 blind / low-vision expert users, we found that Umwelt’s multimodal representations afforded complementary overview and detailed perspectives on a dataset, allowing participants to fluidly shift between task- and representation-oriented ways of thinking.

We present Animated Vega-Lite, a set of extensions to Vega-Lite that model animated visualizations as time-varying data queries. In contrast to alternate approaches for specifying animated visualizations, which prize a highly expressive design space, Animated Vega-Lite prioritizes unifying animation with the language's existing abstractions for static and interactive visualizations to enable authors to smoothly move between or combine these modalities. Thus, to compose animation with static visualizations, we represent time as an encoding channel. Time encodings map a data field to animation keyframes, providing a lightweight specification for animations without interaction. To compose animation and interaction, we also represent time as an event stream; Vega-Lite selections, which provide dynamic data queries, are now driven not only by input events but by timer ticks as well. We evaluate the expressiveness of our approach through a gallery of diverse examples that demonstrate coverage over taxonomies of both interaction and animation. We also critically reflect on the conceptual affordances and limitations of our contribution by interviewing five expert developers of existing animation grammars. These reflections highlight the key motivating role of in-the-wild examples, and identify three central tradeoffs: the language design process, the types of animated transitions supported, and how the systems model keyframes.

Abstract Current web accessibility guidelines ask visualization designers to support screen readers via basic non‐visual alternatives like textual descriptions and access to raw data tables. But charts do more than summarize data or reproduce tables; they afford interactive data exploration at varying levels of granularity—from fine‐grained datum‐by‐datum reading to skimming and surfacing high‐level trends. In response to the lack of comparable non‐visual affordances, we present a set of rich screen reader experiences for accessible data visualization and exploration. Through an iterative co‐design process, we identify three key design dimensions for expressive screen reader accessibility: structure, or how chart entities should be organized for a screen reader to traverse; navigation, or the structural, spatial, and targeted operations a user might perform to step through the structure; and, description, or the semantic content, composition, and verbosity of the screen reader's narration. We operationalize these dimensions to prototype screen‐reader‐accessible visualizations that cover a diverse range of chart types and combinations of our design dimensions. We evaluate a subset of these prototypes in a mixed‐methods study with 13 blind and visually impaired readers. Our findings demonstrate that these designs help users conceptualize data spatially, selectively attend to data of interest at different levels of granularity, and experience control and agency over their data analysis process. An accessible HTML version of this paper is available at: http://vis.csail.mit.edu/pubs/rich-screen-reader-vis-experiences .

Recent graphical interfaces offer direct manipulation mechanisms for authoring visualizations, but are largely restricted to static output. To author interactive visualizations, users must instead turn to textual specification, but such approaches impose a higher technical burden. To bridge this gap, we introduce Lyra 2, a system that extends a prior visualization design environment with novel methods for authoring interaction techniques by demonstration. Users perform an interaction (e.g., button clicks, drags, or key presses) directly on the visualization they are editing. The system interprets this performance using a set of heuristics and enumerates suggestions of possible interaction designs. These heuristics account for the properties of the interaction (e.g., target and event type) as well as the visualization (e.g., mark and scale types, and multiple views). Interaction design suggestions are displayed as thumbnails; users can preview and test these suggestions, iteratively refine them through additional demonstrations, and finally apply and customize them via property inspectors. We evaluate our approach through a gallery of diverse examples, and evaluate its usability through a first-use study and via an analysis of its cognitive dimensions. We find that, in Lyra 2, interaction design by demonstration enables users to rapidly express a wide range of interactive visualizations.