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Big announcement: The final project of my thesis work, Skeleton: Visual Authoring of Non-visual Data Experiences, has now been accepted for publication at IEEE VIS! 🎉 🎉 🎉

In short, we decided to explore a rather spicy conjecture: what if *sighted* people face barriers when trying to author non-visual experiences? What if non-visual accessibility work itself could be made more accessible?

It might seem obvious once you understand the problem, but when sighted people design non-visual user experiences (text, tactiles, sonification, navigation), they often first use visual symbols, metaphors, and language. Their "first language" is visual, so to speak. But what happens after design?

When it comes to navigation experiences specifically, suddenly the traversal paths, navigation nodes, relationships, rules, and logic of navigation become invisible. Design starts visual, but development and testing remain non-visual.

We set out not only to make navigation experiences visual during development and testing, but also to explore how creators shift their thinking when these visual elements can be directly manipulated, changed, altered, and acted upon.

We explore our questions through 2 years of co-design, co-development, tool-making, and prototype building. We also have a study with some really neat findings, too.

Biggest takeaway? It seems obvious, but making non-visual design elements visual and manipulable encouraged sighted authors to treat navigation as a proper space of design, iterating heavily and even reconsidering visual design choices as a result of working with these non-visual elements.