Objective

While accessibility for quantitative charts has improved, qualitative data visualizations remain largely inaccessible to BLV researchers. These structures encode rich semantic relationships rather than numerical values, lack predictable grid layouts, and are built iteratively during analysis. Mainstream qualitative data analysis software (QDAS) such as NVivo relies on mouse-dependent interactions, produces visual-only outputs, and lacks screen reader compatibility. With approximately 2.2 billion people worldwide experiencing vision impairment, inaccessible tooling excludes qualified BLV analysts from consequential data work in business intelligence, AI development, and document analysis.

Research questions

1. How can multimodal representations (structured text, sonification, interactive navigation, and AI-generated descriptions) effectively convey qualitative visualization semantics?
2. How do these representations support analytical reasoning tasks such as pattern identification and theme development?
3. What recommendations do BLV researchers make to enable accessible qualitative visualization authoring?

Work

QUARTZ integrates three multimodal representation strategies, each augmented by AI-assisted description generation:

• Structured textual descriptions, hierarchical, navigable text adapted from semantic levels in prior research.
• Sonification, mappings that encode network topology and inter-code relationships through pitch, rhythm, and spatial audio.
• Interactive navigation, keyboard-driven exploration of graph structures, with screen reader–compatible feedback.

AI-generated natural language summaries provide overviews and contextual descriptions with human-in-the-loop refinement. The system supports three core visualization types: network graphs (thematic networks and knowledge graphs), concept maps, and annotated text views with coding stripes.

Methods: Participatory co-design and user interviews with BLV practitioners; qualitative analysis and thematic coding; usability-oriented evaluation of multimodal representations. Findings directly informed design guidelines and system requirements.

The QUARTZ interface: a visual network graph with controls for filtering, display options, and readability metrics.

End result

Insights & recommendations

• Design guidelines for accessible multimodal representations of qualitative data structures.
• Technical approaches for AI-assisted natural language description generation of relational data structures.
• Empirical findings from user studies on how multimodal representations support analytical reasoning; recommendations informed the QUARTZ open-source system (visual, textual, and auditory modalities).

Impact

This work advances multimodal information access beyond traditional chart types and contributes open-source tooling that extends accessibility infrastructure. As qualitative methods increasingly inform business intelligence, policy analysis, and AI training data curation, accessible tooling determines who can participate in data-driven decision-making. QUARTZ enables BLV practitioners to conduct independent qualitative analysis, addressing a barrier documented by prior work.

Reflection

Leading research with BLV practitioners reinforced how critical co-design and lived experience are for accessibility work. If I were to revisit this project, I would invest earlier in structured usability benchmarks and iterate on sonification mappings with more participants to strengthen generalizability of the guidelines.

Research skills demonstrated

• User interviews and participatory co-design
• Qualitative analysis and thematic coding
• Usability evaluation and task analysis
• Translating research into actionable design guidelines
• Cross-functional collaboration with academic and community stakeholders

Methods

User research and interviews, participatory co-design, usability testing and task analysis, qualitative analysis and thematic coding, translating insights to design guidelines.