8 Multimodal Presentation of Two-Dimensional Charts: An Investigation Using Open Office XML and Microsoft Excel IYAD ABU DOUSH, ENRICO PONTELLI, TRAN CAO SON, DOMINIC SIMON, and OU MA New Mexico State University Several solutions, based on aural and haptic feedback, have been developed to enable access to complex on-line and digital information contents for people with visual impairment. Neverthe- less, there are several components of widely used software applications that are still beyond the reach of traditional screen readers and Braille displays. This article investigates the nonvisual ac- cessibility issues associated with the graphing component of Microsoft Excel and proposes a novel approach and system. The goal is to provide flexible multi-modal presentation schemes which can help visually impaired users in comprehending the most commonly used two dimensional business charts, demonstrated within the familiar context of Excel charts. The methodology identifies the need for three distinct strategies used in the user interaction with a chart: exploratory, guided, and summarization. These methodologies have been implemented using a multimodal approach, which combines aural cues, speech commentaries, and 3-dimensional haptic feedback. The proto- type implementation and the preliminary studies suggest that the multimodality can be effectively realized and users denote preferences in intertwining these methodologies to gain understanding of the content of charts. These methodologies have been implemented in a system, which makes use of the Novint Falcon haptic device and integrated as a plug-in in Microsoft Excel. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces General Terms: Design, Human Factors Additional Key Words and Phrases: Haptic, assistive technology, accessible graphs, nonvisual charts navigation ACM Reference Format: Abu Doush, I., Pontelli, E., Son, T. C., Simon, D., and Ma, O. 2010. Multimodal presentation of two- dimensional charts: An investigation using Open Office XML and Microsoft Excel. ACM Trans. Access. Comput. 3, 2, Article 8 (November 2010), 50 pages. DOI = 10.1145/1857920.1857925. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1857920.1857925. This research has been supported by NSF grant CBET-0754525, “Analytical and Exploratory Approaches to Communicate Mathematics to Visually Impaired Students.” Author’s address: E. Pontelli, Department of Computer Science, New Mexico State University, Box 30001, MSC CS, Las Cruces, NM 99003; email: epontelli@cs.nmsu.edu. Permission to make digital or hard copies part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial ad- vantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be hon- ored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specific per- mission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from the Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY 10121-0701 USA, fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. c  2010 ACM 1936-7228/2010/11-ART8 $10.00 DOI: 10.1145/1857920.1857925. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1857920.1857925. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, Vol. 3, No. 2, Article 8, Pub. date: November 2010.