GeoVisA11y Earns Best Paper at CHI'26

Jon E. Froehlich

By Jon E. Froehlich

A screenshot of the front page of the GeoVisA11y paper

We are honored that our work on GeoVisA11y earned a Best Paper Award at CHI'26, recognizing the top 1% of submissions (of 6,730).

GeoVisA11y is an LLM-based question-answering system that makes geovisualizations accessible through natural language interaction. The system supports map reading, analysis, interpretation and navigation by handling analytical, geospatial, visual and contextual queries. This work builds on AltGeoViz, which was published at VIS'25.

Congratulations to the first-author, PhD student Chu Li, for leading this entire effort from ideation to implementation and evaluation and to the entire team spanning ugrads (Henok Assalif) to faculty (Jeff Heer and myself).