A11yBoard: Making Digital Artboards Accessible to Blind and Low-Vision Users

Digital artboards, which hold objects rather than pixels (e.g., Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides), remain largely inaccessible for blind and low-vision (BLV) users. Building on prior findings about the experiences of BLV users with digital artboards, we present a novel tool called A11yBoard, an interactive multimodal system that makes interpreting and authoring digital artboards accessible. A11yBoard combines a web-based drawing canvas paired with a mobile touch screen device such as a tablet. The mobile device displays the same canvas and enables risk-free spatial exploration of the artboard via touch and gesture. Speech recognition, non-speech audio, and keyboard-based commands are also used for input and output. Through a series of pilot studies and formal task-based user studies with BLV participants, we show that A11yBoard provides (1) intuitive spatial reasoning about two-dimensional objects, (2) multimodal access to objects’ properties and relationships, and (3) eyes-free creating and editing of objects to establish their desired properties and positions.