GeoVisA11y

GeoVisA11y is an open-source system for interactive and accessible map visualization.

This repository contains the code for the GeoVisA11y prototype, presented in our CHI'26 paper GeoVisA11y: AI-based Geovisualization QA System for Screen-Reader Users by Chu Li, Rock Pang, Arnavi Chheda-Kothary, Ather Sharif, Henok Assalif, Jeffrey Heer and Jon E. Froehlich.

Cite GeoVisA11y

@inproceedings{li2026geovisa11y,
  author={Li, Chu and Pang, Rock and Chheda-Kothary, Arnavi and Sharif, Ather and Assalif, Henok and Heer, Jeffrey and Froehlich, Jon E.},
  booktitle={2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)}, 
  title={GeoVisA11y: AI-based Geovisualization QA System for Screen-Reader Users}, 
  year={2026},
  pages={1-17},
  keywords={Geovisualization;Accessibility;Screen-reader;AI;QA;Visualization},
  doi={https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790334}}

Architecture

• Frontend (src/): React app with Mapbox GL for choropleth and dot-density map visualizations, plus a speech-enabled chatbot
• Backend (backend/): Flask API with DuckDB for spatial queries, OpenAI for natural language QA, and MongoDB for analytics logging

Setup

1. Copy .env.example to .env and fill in your API keys.
2. Place spatial-db.db in backend/database/ (to request this file, please email chuchuli@cs.washington.edu)
3. Install dependencies:
   • Backend: cd backend && pip install -r requirements.txt
   • Frontend: npm install

Running the Application

Backend:

cd backend
flask run

Frontend:

npm start

The app will open at http://localhost:3000

Debug Logging

Backend logging is controlled by the level parameter in each file's logging.basicConfig() call:

• backend/routes/log_routes.py — set to WARNING by default
• backend/routes/api.py — set to INFO by default

To see verbose debug output, change the level to logging.DEBUG:

logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG)

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.