A summary of the article: Methodology for heuristic evaluation of the accessibility of statistical charts for people with low vision and color vision deficiency Rubén Alcaraz Martínez Departament de Biblioteconomia, Documentació i Comunicació Audiovisual Universitat de Barcelona Barcelona, Spain ralcaraz@ub.edu Mireia Ribera Departament de Matemàtiques i Informàtica. Institut de Matemàtiques Universitat de Barcelona Barcelona, Spain ribera@ub.edu Toni Granollers Saltiveri Departament d’Informàtica i Enginyeria Industrial Universitat de Lleida Lleida, Spain antoni.granollers@udl.cat ABSTRACT This contribution is a summary of the paper: R. Alcaraz Martínez, M. Ribera, T. Granollers (2021). Methodology for heuristic evaluation of the accessibility of statistical charts for people with low vision and color vision deficiency. Universal access in the information society. doi:10.1007/s10209-021-00816-0. The research presented in this paper aims to create a set of heuristics to evaluate the accessibility of statistical charts focusing on the needs of people with low vision (LV) and color vision deficiency (CVD). To do so, a set of heuristics was developed based on the methodology by Quiñones et al. [6]. Once created a first version set of heuristics (17 indicators) was applied on two evaluations. After the evaluations, the list has been amplified to 18 indicators and received other improvements: the scoring was simplified, and the authors created further documentation for evaluators. This research is a first step in the direction to create accessible charts for people with low vision, a user profile normally forgotten in digital accessibility research. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing • Accessibility • Accessibility design and evaluation methods KEYWORDS Charts, Data visualization, Accessibility, Heuristic evaluation, Low vision, Color blindness 1 Introduction and background Statistical charts have an important role in conveying, clarifying and simplifying information, thus making information more accessible to everybody [1] because they improve the understanding of big volumes of data very efficiently and reduce the cognitive load associated with reading and digesting textual and tabular information. Low vision (LV) is defined as the condition under which a person’s vision could not be corrected completely with correcting lenses. LV difficulties may be classified under five different categories: visual acuity; light sensitivity; contrast sensitivity; field of vision; and color vision deficiency (CVD). A previous literature research [2] unveiled an important lack of publications and guidelines focused on the accessibility of statistical charts for people with LV and CVD. This identified gap adds to the existing marginality of a user group representing the 97% of people with visual disabilities [3], in the field of accessibility research. 2 Methodology and results obtained The research presented in this paper is based on the Heuristic Evaluation (HE) method, one of the most efficient usability evaluation techniques without users [4]. Although there is no a clear agreement on the best suitable process or methodology to develop heuristics within the literature [5], this research adopts the proposal by Quiñones et al. [6] of a formal and systematic methodology as the framework of reference and complements it with the metrics proposed by Jiménez et al. [7] to validate the efficiency of the proposed indicators compared to an existing heuristic list control. This methodology has eight stages. Each one is summarized below, and the results obtained are detailed: 1) exploratory stage: the focus of this stage is to do a literature review with the goal to collect information in order to develop the heuristic list thorough a review of WCAG 2.1 and concomitant documents and tried to gather all criteria related to the subject of this work. As a second step the authors carried out a literature review about charts accessibility for LV users [2]; 2) experimental stage: the objective of this stage is to analyze data obtained from previous experiments to retrieve additional This work is licensed under a Creative Commons “Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International” license. 99