Weekly Web Harvest for 2022-10-02

Online data visualizations play an important role in informing public opinion but are often inaccessible to screen reader users. To address the need for accessible data representations on the web that provide direct, multimodal, and up-to-date access to the data, we investigate audio data narratives –which combine textual descriptions and sonification (the mapping of data to non-speech sounds). We conduct two co-design workshops with screen reader users to define design principles that guide the structure, content, and duration of a data narrative. Based on these principles and relevant auditory processing characteristics, we propose a dynamic programming approach to automatically generate an audio data narrative from a given dataset. We evaluate our approach with 16 screen reader users. Findings show with audio narratives, users gain significantly more insights from the data. Users describe data narratives help them better extract and comprehend the information in both the sonification and description.

Musk’s critics are right to point out that he frequently makes claims he can’t back up, that his business practices don’t match his public persona, and that he regularly holds forth on subjects about which he seems to know very little. He really does mislead and misdirect sometimes, but to write him off as a grifter is to fail to engage not just with the scale and influence of his companies but also with how his ardent supporters and casual admirers actually experience him: as a guy who talks about the future in a way that isn’t exclusively depressing.

It’s a low bar, but we live in depressing times. Musk is fluent in cozy and familiar futuristic and sci-fi tropes. Electric cars. Fast electric cars. Self-driving electric cars? Spaceships. Spaceships with people. Spaceships with people going to Mars? A computer for your brain! A brain made out of computers!

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“It’s been a general Is this really how business is done? There’s no real strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.”