Towards a Data Physicalization Toolkit for Non-Sighted Users

Access to data is becoming increasingly important to people, both professionals and non-professionals. With a proper representation, people can gain a mental model of the relations between entities related to different domains. The involvement in gathering data and creating representations can bring additional benefits in terms of awareness for all categories of people, as shown by the results of citizen science. As most data representations are designed for the visual channel, non-sighted people are not granted equal access opportunities. This represents a serious drawback in allowing everyone to gain an autonomous understanding of data and forces non-sighted people to rely only on interpretations provided by someone else. This paper contributes to improve this situation by proposing a physicalization toolkit for non-sighted persons that can be used to create and access data representations, starting from a tabular description. The toolkit is the result of the application of a methodology that begins with an initial mapping of the properties of physical objects to tasks associated with data understanding, arriving at a modular solution that can be applied to different use contexts. The physicalization toolkit is finally tested on an example related to the representation of environmental data gathered along a path.