Technology Advances and Standardization Toward Accessible Business Graphics

Various types of graphics are exchanged in our daily business and education processes. In spite of the importance of business graphics, they are not accessible for visually impaired people, especially for the blind, and this impacts their productivity at work. Current serialization-based screen reading techniques do not provide sufficient functionality for accessing graphics. In this paper, we report the results of our survey to identify next generation accessibility features in future graphics standards, especially for the OpenDocument Format (ODF). We will first compare accessibility functions in various types of existing standards. Then we will report our survey results for three related areas, a survey of existing business graphics in presentation documents to unveil the complexity of practical graphics, a survey of research on various types of graphical taxonomies, and a survey of interface technologies for representing graphics non-visually, such as screen reading and pictorial Braille. Finally, we will propose three practical enhancements for standard graphic formats based on the survey results.