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To understand mixed-ability collaborative data analysis, I spent some time observing and talking with members of Bower Lab, an oceanography research lab at WHOI led by blind scientist Amy Bower.

We found that data representations provide shared ways to refer to data and direct collaborators' attention. These linguistic and social affordances help scientists establish common ground (a shared understanding of the data they're analyzing).

This suggests reframing visualization accessibility as effective bidirectional communication, not just individual access to data. Further, how might we design multimodal representations that distribute these communicative affordances equally across visual and non-visual modalities?