Visionary Caption: Improving the Accessibility of Presentation Slides Through Highlighting Visualization

Abstract

Presentation slides are widely used in occasions such as academic talks and business meetings. Captions placed on slides support deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people to understand spoken contents, but simultaneously comprehending and associating visual contents on slides and caption text could be challenging. In this paper, we design and develop a visualization technique to highlight and associate chart on a slide and numerical data in caption. We first conduct a small formative study with people with and without hearing impairments to assess the value of the visualization technique using a lo-fidelity video prototype. We then develop Visionary Caption, a visualization technique that uses natural language processing to automatically highlight visual content and numerical phrases, and show the association between them. We present a scenario and personas to showcase the potential utility of Visionary Caption and guide its future development.