Finding ways to include those with visual challenges in the fields of statistics and mathematics will enhance their employment opportunities. How can we encourage this? How can libraries or assistive services and technology center add to this conversation?
Bringing interaction could help? For example, moving a mobile device in front of a screen where visualization is displayed, letting device to translate the visual pattern into a sound or music or vibration. Zooming in and out can be done by moving a device near to or far from screen. Sophisticated translation should be needed in translation of a visualization pattern in wide range. However, this doesn't change the paradigm for how to represent informative data. This approach is a mere extension of current visualization approach. But still, if the target data is of statistics or mathematics kind, this approach could help in some way.
I'm considering about doing data-materialization or something like that, create a 3d modelling by using 3D printer. I think it should need a different approach in representing the data into the figure than the standard visualization techniques, though.
It really depends on the receptive preference of person, i.e. do people prefer visual, auditory or tactile interaction with the data. All are possible, as is a mixture of the three.
Remember we are dealing with an abstraction - the presentation layer. Visualisation is just one instantiation type. The real key is that the information can be received intuitively by the user and status can be discerned almost immediately. Combining all three is probably of benefit to everyone dealing with data.
Lots of interesting work in stereoscopic 3D sound including location and depth perception and tactile sense training but I haven't seen any applied work. The capability is definitely there but there is relatively little concrete research into intuitive design for auditory and tactile data systems.
For data sonification I suggest you to look http://sonification.de/handbook/
Visualization can be complemented (or substituted) with its auditory analog, auralization (also called sonification, though I prefer the former term). I did my dissertation on the use of auditory illusions to aid in the understanding of computational fluid dynamics data. You can find a conference paper, as well as my dissertation, on my publications page, if you're interested in details.
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