Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The 2024  IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics Conference (VIS) , initially scheduled as a hybrid event from October 13 to 18 at the Hilton Tampa Downtown in Tampa, Florida, was transitioned to an entirely virtual format due to Hurricane Milton's projected trajectory and the potential for significant impacts on the Tampa area. I participated virtually, attending workshops, full paper presentations, and engaging panel discussions. IEEE VIS  is a premier forum for showcasing visualization and visual analytics theory, methodologies, and application advancements. This year, the conference had an overall acceptance rate of 22.26%. Our paper, " Towards Enhancing Low Vision Usability of Data Charts on Smartphones ," was accepted as a full paper. I had the privilege of presenting it on October 17, 2024, from 13:45 to 15:00 EST. 👀 Keep an eye out for our daily VIS 2024 round ups and other posts this week to follow the conference on social media. We can’t wait to see you virtu...

Table 1  Soper  et al. :  Classification of common OCR error types, their descriptions, and representative examples. These categories highlight challenges in text recognition systems, such as over-segmentation of words into multiple parts, merging of separate words (under-segmentation), character misinterpretations, omissions, and the generation of spurious or nonsensical content. extracted from the 'Details' page for quick and efficient information retrieval. Optical Character Recognition  (OCR) is pivotal in various applications, including online education, industrial automation, robotics, and more. The technology is designed to extract text from different image sources, ranging from scanned documents to text embedded in complex, real-world environments. However, despite its widespread adoption, OCR continues to face significant challenges due to inaccuracies in its output, as shown in Table 1 and Table 2.  Table 2  Soper et al.: Detailed examples of OC...

  EICS 2024 marks the sixteenth international ACM SIGCHI conference, focused on engineering interactive computing systems and their user interfaces. The conference explores research at the intersection of user interface design, software engineering, and computational interaction. Our research paper, " All in One Place: Ensuring Usable Access to Online Shopping Items for Blind Users ," was published in the June 2024 issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 8, in the EICS category . In this blog post, I will summarize our research paper, which focuses on alleviating the significant interaction challenges that blind users encounter when navigating through dispersed content across multiple sections and pages on shopping websites. These issues arise because information related to shopping items is frequently spread across different web page sect...