Bar Charts in Popular Media: Conveying Their Message to Visually Impaired Users via Speech

Information graphics such as bar charts, line graphs, and pie charts play a vital role in many documents found on the Web. In contrast to graphics generated for the purposes of data visualization, which are intended to allow the viewer to visually explore the data, we posit that the majority of information graphics that appear in popular media are designed to convey a clear message to the viewer [5]. These visual constructs serve as a communication medium between the graphic designer and the viewer, since they enable the viewer to quickly and easily perform complex tasks such as comparing entities or identifying trends [26, 8, 2] in order to infer the message being conveyed by the graphic designer.