How can I do this myself?bookmark_border

When domain experts create charts, the bottleneck is rarely the data, but knowing the optimal next step in chart design. The visualization design space is vast, and while domain experts can recognize a good design when they see it, it is often challenging to determine the exact path to get there. To address this, we present VISAUTOCOMPLETE, a system inspired by text autocompletion that reconceptualizes visualization design as a sequential process, recommending concrete next steps at each stage of the authoring process based on common practices. Users can intervene at any step, or delegate multiple steps to the system and select one from the design recommendations. To support responsive interaction, we distill the translation logic of a large language model (LLM) into a single function that receives the current chart state and recommended transition as input and returns the updated chart specification as output. We evaluate the system against a LLM vibecoding, Microsoft Excel, and TaskVis, an automated chart recommendation engine, on chart quality and approachability. Our results show that VisAutocomplete outperforms all baselines in the articulacy of complex chart authoring, while remaining on par with LLM in approachability.

Articles containing geographic information are widely distributed and commonly used in daily life, frequently incorporating geographic visualizations as illustrations. However, the creation of such articles remains cumbersome, necessitating authors to switch between authoring text and illustrations, thereby disrupting immersive writing. Our interviews corroborated this observation and revealed the primary challenge in the traditional process stems from the low synchronization frequency between text and geographic visualizations during creation, coupled with weak visual links, forcing users to mentally maintain this synchronization and thereby increasing their cognitive burden. In response, we developed GeoAuthor, which facilitates the interactive creation of geographic articles by automatically synchronizing text creation with geographic visualizations with rich visual links. This bidirectional approach ensures that the written content and visual representations remain consistent and mutually informative throughout the creation process. Our evaluation demonstrated the efficacy of GeoAuthor, indicating its capacity to streamline the process of creating geographic articles.

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. This invisibility makes navigation structures difficult to inspect, debug, and iterate on. To sighted practitioners, every other aspect of a visualization is iterated on because it is visible; navigation structure ships as a first draft, if at all, because it is not. 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 technical advancements for making the properties of accessible navigation structure visible and directly manipulable during authoring, grounded in two foundational pieces of infrastructure produced by our co-design work: 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, building on these, 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.

Creating static visualizations for presentations and publications requires granular refinements of visual details, even for simple charts. Existing data-driven visualization tools offer limited interactive control for such refinements, forcing users to export charts to external graphic editors and breaking the critical link between data and visual representation. To address this gap, we propose an extended InfoVis Reference Model to account for post-render design refinement. A formative study with 18 visualization practitioners and a follow-up survey of 35 respondents confirmed that this stage is pervasive yet unsupported in current practice. Based on these findings, we present TailVis, a visualization authoring system that enables expressive visual customization while preserving data-binding integrity. TailVis supports element-level direct selection and scope expansion, allowing users to define a data-aware scope ranging from a single mark to a data-driven category with a simple selection. For modifications beyond predefined controls, TailVis blends natural language input with dynamically generated GUI widgets, where deictic interaction lets users reference elements simply by clicking them, keeping even open-ended edits bound to the data. To support rigorous exploration and comparison of design alternatives, TailVis implements a provenance history that enables users to capture diverse design iterations while ensuring data-visual integrity. A user study with 12 participants verified that TailVis effectively supports expressive, granular refinement without sacrificing data binding, significantly reducing repetitive manual processes in an integrated environment.

Data videos communicate data insights through dynamic charts, voice narration, and synchronized animations, and have become a widely adopted form of data storytelling. However, their production requires multidisciplinary expertise spanning data analysis, narrative design, and video editing. Static visualization tools lack narrative and animation capabilities; authoring tools rely on pre-prepared charts rather than raw data; and pixel-level generation models, while capable of end-to-end synthesis, cannot guarantee data accuracy or provenance. End-to-end automatic generation faces two core challenges: how to uniformly represent charts, narration, and animations together with their temporal relationships, and how to efficiently search a vast design space for narrative-coherent compositions. We present DataMagic, a system that authors data videos from raw tabular data through declarative multi-agent orchestration, built on two core designs. First, the declarative specification DVSpec unifies charts, narration, and animations with data-bound references and declarative synchronization, ensuring data provenance and automatic audio-visual alignment. Second, a “Generate-then-Orchestrate” multi-agent strategy generates candidate scenes in parallel and then optimizes narrative coherence through global orchestration. DVSpec further serves as a shared state supporting three complementary interaction modes, bridging full automation with fine-grained human control. Evaluations on 109 real-world samples show that even the most advanced LLM (e.g., GPT-5) achieves only 2.13/5 with execution success rates between 48.62% and 86.24%; DataMagic improves quality to 3.89 (+83%) with success rates above 95%, with the most significant gains in animation and narrative dimensions. A user study further demonstrates that, compared to a conversational LLM workflow, DataMagic significantly improves creation efficiency (79.7% reduction in task time) and reduces perceived cognitive load. Source code is available at https://github.com/HKUSTDial/DataMagic.

In this paper, we introduce a new framework for characterizing the user skills required for chart authoring. Despite growing attention to authoring systems, we lack a conceptual framework that characterizes the diverse and multifaceted skills involved and helps identify opportunities for system design and development. Our initial investigation revealed that skill is a complex and elusive concept, and that existing theories on skills from other disciplines are too high-level to capture the importance of tasks and tools in data visualizations. To address this gap, we formulate the CAPED framework that characterizes skill as the ability to create a chart involving five dimensions pertinent to tasks and tools: input data, output chart, paradigm, abstraction, and expression. We demonstrate the framework’s descriptive power by highlighting different skills involved in similar authoring situations and identifying the types of knowledge associated with chart authoring. We further present examples illustrating how the framework can be used to identify new research opportunities in supporting users with varying skills.

We present Chart2SVG, a multimodal large language model that converts static raster charts into structurally organized, semantically enriched SVGs that support programmatic editing. By incorporating chart-specific semantic tokens into a vision-language model, Chart2SVG captures both geometric primitives and their functional roles. To support robust structural recovery, we introduce Beagle+, a dataset of 33K canonicalized and structurally distilled chart samples. Our approach combines specialized training objectives with a rendering-aware post-training phase, producing SVGs that are both visually accurate and structurally consistent. To facilitate higher-level manipulations, we construct a Chart Structure Graph (CSG) that exposes visual dependencies, enabling tasks such as interactive exploration, chart repurposing, and layout reuse. Experiments show that Chart2SVG substantially outperforms baselines in reconstruction fidelity and downstream editing utility, advancing the development of intelligent and interactive visualization tools.