What's in a message?: interpreting geo-referenced data for the visually-impaired

In this paper we describe content determina- tion issues involved in the Atlas.txt project, which aims to automatically describe geo- referenced information such as census data as text for the visually-impaired (VI). Texts com- municating geo-referenced census informa- tion contain census data abstractions and their corresponding geographic references. Be- cause visually impaired users find interpreting geographic references hard, we hypothesized that an introduction message about the under- lying geography should help the users to in- terpret the geographic references easily. We performed user studies to design and evaluate the introduction message. An initial evalua- tion study with several sighted users and one partially sighted user showed that an introduc- tion message is certainly preferred by most participants. Many of them used an introduc- tion message themselves when they described maps textually. But the study also showed that the introduction message made no differ- ence when the participants were asked to draw maps using the information in the textual de- scriptions.