# Skeleton: Visual Authoring of Non-visual Data Experiences

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14579 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14579/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Accessible Visualization via Natural Language Descriptions: A Four-Level Model of Semantic Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04406/) (2021)
- [Rich Screen Reader Experiences for Accessible Data Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04917/) (2022)
- [Sociotechnical Considerations for Accessible Visualization Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05118/) (2019)
- [Umwelt: Accessible Structured Editing of Multimodal Data Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00106/) (2024)
- [MAIDR: Making Statistical Visualizations Accessible with Multimodal Data Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00717/) (2024)
- [Technology Developments in Touch-Based Accessible Graphics: A Systematic Review of Research 2010-2020](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01273/) (2021)
- [Communicating Visualizations without Visuals: Investigation of Visualization Alternative Text for People with Visual Impairments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03657/) (2021)
- [No Grammar to Rule Them All: A Survey of JSON-style DSLs for Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07998/) (2022)
- [Animated Vega-Lite: Unifying Animation with a Grammar of Interactive Graphics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03869/) (2022)
- [When Refreshable Tactile Displays Meet Conversational Agents: Investigating Accessible Data Presentation and Analysis with Touch and Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04806/) (2024)
- ["Customization is Key": Reconfigurable Content Tokens for Accessible Data Visualizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08773/) (2023)
- [Erie: A Declarative Grammar for Data Sonification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00156/) (2024)
- [Data Navigator: An accessibility-centered data navigation toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08475/) (2023)
- [Refreshable Tactile Displays for Accessible Data Visualisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15836/) (2024)
- [Using Real Names of Disabled Participant-Contributors to Practice Citational Justice in Accessibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14257/) (2025)
- [From Vision to Touch: Bridging Visual and Tactile Principles for Accessible Data Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05433/) (2025)
- [Nonvisual Support for Understanding and Reasoning about Data Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19168/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

When sighted practitioners author accessible data visualizations, they build navigation structures (the nodes, edges, and input bindings that govern how assistive technologies traverse an interface) entirely in code, with no visual representation. Without a representation to react to, practitioners cannot develop judgment about what makes navigation good or bad, and the quality ceiling of non-visual experiences is set by the absence of a feedback loop. We address this problem through longitudinal co-design with practitioners across cartography, design systems, and open-source visualization, and make three contributions. First, we introduce an Inspector that renders navigation graphs as interactive node-link diagrams, and a Dimensions API that expresses navigation in terms of data dimensions rather than explicit graph construction. Second we present Skeleton, a direct-manipulation authoring environment in which the properties of an accessible navigation structure are translated into visual representations authors can observe and manipulate. Key techniques include a dual-view editor that simultaneously shows the system's navigation model and the end user's spatial experience, a scaffolding engine that automates spatial node placement by repurposing a visualization rendering pipeline, a live label-template editor with real-time screen-reader-output preview, and a testing mode that makes traversal sequence visually trackable. Third, we evaluate Skeleton through an in-situ study with 8 practitioners across visualization design, engineering, and research. Making navigation structure visible changed how practitioners engaged with accessible design: they reconsidered the architecture of their own visualizations, attended to a broader range of input modalities, and shifted from treating accessibility as a compliance task to treating it as a design problem. (abstract shortened for arxiv)