The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected older adults, making it critical for them to stay informed about the latest information. Online interactive visualizations such as live dashboards and websites have become increasingly popular for presenting this information. To ensure these visualizations are accessible to older adults, a user-centered approach was adopted by inviting them to interact with the visualizations while verbalizing their thought processes using a think-aloud protocol. Through analyzing their verbalizations, four types of thought processes were identified representing how older adults comprehended the visualizations and the challenges they encountered. Additionally, seven common types of interaction techniques used by the visualizations were also identified. Based on these findings, design guidelines were presented for making interactive visualizations more accessible to older adults. These guidelines include increasing legibility through sub-guidelines such as having sufficient contrast in color schemes and text size as well as spacing out important elements so that navigating them does not require fine motor skills or good eyesight. Furthermore, a taxonomy of COVID-19 information was constructed from captions and labels of axes from a data set of COVID-19 visualizations. This taxonomy revealed two themes related to COVID-19: expressions and impacts which contained several sub-themes each. Tasks for the visualizations were designed based on different levels of complexity and covering all common interaction types in Section 3.2. Overall, these findings provide valuable insights into designing online interactive COVID-19 visualizations that are accessible to older adults while providing important observations about the pandemic's impact on society at large.
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Making Interactive COVID-19 Visualizations Accessible to Older Adults
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on older adults, making it critical for them to stay informed about the latest information. Online interactive visualizations such as live dashboards and websites have become increasingly popular for presenting this information. However, there is still a need to ensure that these visualizations are accessible to older adults who may not be familiar with technology or have difficulty understanding complex visuals. To address this issue, a user-centered approach was adopted by inviting older adults to interact with the visualizations while verbalizing their thought processes using a think-aloud protocol.
Analyzing Thought Processes of Older Adults
Through analyzing their verbalizations, four types of thought processes were identified representing how older adults comprehended the visualizations and the challenges they encountered. These included: (1) comprehension of data elements; (2) comparison between different data elements; (3) interpretation of trends in data; and (4) navigation within the visualization interface. Additionally, seven common types of interaction techniques used by the visualizations were also identified including selection, filtering, sorting/ranking, zooming/panning/scrolling, brushing/linking/highlighting etc.
Design Guidelines for Making Visualization More Accessible
Based on these findings design guidelines were presented for making interactive visualizations more accessible to older adults. These guidelines include increasing legibility through sub-guidelines such as having sufficient contrast in color schemes and text size as well as spacing out important elements so that navigating them does not require fine motor skills or good eyesight. Furthermore, tasks for the visualizations should be designed based on different levels of complexity and covering all common interaction types identified in Section 3.2 above so that users can easily understand what action needs to be taken when interacting with the visualization interface.
Taxonomy Reveals Themes Related To COVID-19 Impact On Society
A taxonomy of COVID-19 information was constructed from captions and labels of axes from a data set of COVID-19 visualizations which revealed two themes related to COVID-19: expressions and impacts which contained several subthemes each such as health care system capacity or economic impact etc.. This provides valuable insights into designing online interactive COVID-19 visualizatons that are accessible to older adults while providing important observations about the pandemic's impact on society at large which can help inform policy decisions going forward regarding how best to mitigate its effects both now and in future outbreaks if any occur again down the line..
Older adults have been hit disproportionally hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. One critical way for older adults to minimize the negative impact of COVID-19 and future pandemics is to stay informed about its latest information, which has been increasingly presented through online interactive visualizations (e.g., live dashboards and websites). Thus, it is imperative to understand how older adults interact with and comprehend online COVID-19 interactive visualizations and what challenges they might encounter to make such visualizations more accessible to older adults. We adopted a user-centered approach by inviting older adults to interact with COVID-19 interactive visualizations while at the same time verbalizing their thought processes using a think-aloud protocol. By analyzing their think-aloud verbalizations, we identified four types of thought processes representing how older adults comprehended the visualizations and uncovered the challenges they encountered. Furthermore, we also identified the challenges they encountered with seven common types of interaction techniques adopted by the visualizations. Based on the findings, we present design guidelines for making interactive visualizations more accessible to older adults.
