Proposal and Evaluation of Textual Description Templates for Bar Charts Vocalization

The textual description of data charts is a complex task. A chart presents different visual characteristics for the information represented, which can be influenced by the technique selected and the combination of visual elements. There are crowdsourcing initiatives to create descriptions for charts available on the Web, but the descriptions can have failures, considering that they arise from the understanding of the person. In this context, methods to automatically extract data from chart images allow producing descriptions for use in these scenarios. However, there is no standard way of vocalizing the chart content. For this, the textual description must be based on a template, so that the chart can be completely understood. Thus, this paper presents templates that allow verbalizing the data extracted from vertical and grouped bar charts in an intelligible way. Evaluations were performed with users to verify the ease of understanding textual descriptions. The results showed that the proposed templates were suitable for vocalization the contents of bar charts.