Patrick Carrington

Frank Elavsky, Chieri Nnadozie, Lucas Nadolskis et al. · apple-ml, cmu

When sighted practitioners author accessible data visualizations, they build navigation structures (the nodes, edges, and input bindings that govern how assistive technologies traverse an interface) entirely in code, with no visual representation. Without a representation to react to, practitioners cannot develop judgment about what makes navigation good or bad, and the quality ceiling of non-visual experiences is set by the absence of a feedback loop. We address this problem through longitudinal co-design with practitioners across cartography, design systems, and open-source visualization, and make three contributions. First, we introduce an Inspector that renders navigation graphs as interactive node-link diagrams, and a Dimensions API that expresses navigation in terms of data dimensions rather than explicit graph construction. Second we present Skeleton, a direct-manipulation authoring environment in which the properties of an accessible navigation structure are translated into visual representations authors can observe and manipulate. Key techniques include a dual-view editor that simultaneously shows the system's navigation model and the end user's spatial experience, a scaffolding engine that automates spatial node placement by repurposing a visualization rendering pipeline, a live label-template editor with real-time screen-reader-output preview, and a testing mode that makes traversal sequence visually trackable. Third, we evaluate Skeleton through an in-situ study with 8 practitioners across visualization design, engineering, and research. Making navigation structure visible changed how practitioners engaged with accessible design: they reconsidered the architecture of their own visualizations, attended to a broader range of input modalities, and shifted from treating accessibility as a compliance task to treating it as a design problem. (abstract shortened for arxiv)

Yunzhi Li, Patrick Carrington

Smartphone-based context-awareness holds significant promise for wheelchair users -- from detecting everyday accessibility barriers to enabling ability-based adaptations. Such capabilities often build on passive context inference through mobile sensing, yet their accuracy hinges on how and where phones are carried and the resulting signal quality. While prior work documents phone-carrying behaviors in the general population, patterns specific to wheelchair users remain underexplored. Through a mixed-methods approach combining a survey of 91 and interviews with 15 wheelchair users, we systematically investigate their phone-carrying locations and influencing factors. Our findings reveal distinct patterns extending beyond pocket storage to diverse wheelchair-mounted accessories and around-body placements, shaped by the interplay of physical ability, wheelchair design, and everyday contexts, including social, activity, and device factors. Grounded in these findings, we articulate how carrying location can serve as a proxy for user context to enable novel context-aware experiences, and discuss design implications for developing inclusive and effective mobile context-aware applications.