Based on vote records of 2921 motions of current Hong Kong Legislative Council meetings, Initium Lab analyzed the voting patterns of 70 legislators in Legco Matrix project. For visualization, we made a heat map of 70 rows by 70 columns, with the brightness of each cell representing supportiveness from one voter towards one motion mover (in terms of the percentage of supporting votes).
The heat map might be helpful for many who wanted to have insights into Hong Kong politics, but definitely not for the blind. Actually, nowadays, only a few of the fancy digital news products have really taken visually-challenged people into account.
Yet in Initium Lab, we do care about news accessibility. With the help from MakeBlock engineers, we turned the heat map into 3D model and managed producing an array of touchable blocks using 3D printing technology. Each cell in the heat map was printed as a small pillar, and the height of pillars represented strength of support. By doing so, we hoped we could introduce the beauty of data to the visually impaired.
On October 2nd 2015, for the first time, we tested this 3D-printed infographic with a blind user – Chong Chan Yau, president of Hong Kong Blind Union as well as a politically active celebrity in Hong Kong.
With our explanation and assistance, Mr. Chong managed to roughly understand the infographic’s idea in about ten minutes, yet he found it greatly difficult to read specific blocks.
Mr. Chong said one would easily get lost when navigating with finger, because the pillars were too small and too densely arranged. He suggested that we put marks on each pillar showing the value it represents, say, one marked 80% on the top and the other 40%. With these marks, blind users could feel the quantitative differences between the pillars.
Braille was another problem. Mr. Chong thought we put those small braille characters together in a vague way, for we did not notice that the space between two braille characters and the space between two columns inside one character were different . Meanwhile, he emphasized that we should be cautious about block size and gap of braille characters by following standards. He also reminded us to note visually-challenged people’s reading direction.
With these practical and considerate suggestions, Mr. Chong Chan Yau encouraged us to keep experimenting physical infographics and turn the cool idea into a real solution stack for the blind. He highlighted the novelty of our 3D infographic, remarking that he had never seen such approach to presenting data before.