Intention-Based Description

An approach to generating accessible descriptions of visual content (particularly graphs and data visualisations) that focuses on communicating what the creator intended to convey rather than exhaustively describing every visual element. In graph accessibility, intention-based descriptions identify the key message, trend, or comparison that the graph is designed to communicate, and present this information first before providing supporting details. This contrasts with element-based descriptions that enumerate individual bars, lines, or data points without prioritising their significance. The approach draws on cognitive theories of graph comprehension, such as Pinker's theory that graph understanding involves recognising the visual patterns that encode the creator's intended message. Intention-based descriptions are generally more useful to blind users because they provide the same high-level understanding that a sighted person would gain from a quick glance at the graph.