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Making graphs built from large datasets accessible - help requested

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From: Will Anderson
Date: Jun 18, 2013 9:07AM

Good morning everyone,
My organization is building analytics software for government child
protective services to give day-by-day insight into the current level of
care being offered the children and families under the supervision of the
agency.

While we have a mandate to be 508 compliant, we also want to do the right
thing and make the feature set accessible to all. The more people that can
understand these numbers, the better it furthers our non-profit mission.

Our data set makes it hard to build accessible charts and we're not sure if
providing the raw data would be useful . Here are some of our challenges:

- # Data points: Some of our most useful graphs are built off roughly
1,000 data points. That number is projected to increase as time passes and
we get more data in our system.
- Dynamically generated: Our graphs change based on user data entry.
Right now, they change overnight. We're planning for the graphs to be
redrawn as close-to-realtime as possible though.
- User generated: We're building tools that allow our user base to
create their own graphs meaning we can't caption them ourselves.
- Our data often show long term trends with significant short term
variation: If we provided a table, how can we help the assistive tech user
see the forrest for the trees?

We've looked for resources on the web for this problem but the closest
resource we found is IBM's Accessible Analytics: Complex Charts, Large
Datasets, and Node
Diagrams<http://www-03.ibm.com/able/news/downloads/IBM_Accessible_Analytics_CSUN_2011.pdf>;
but
that explicitly calls out many of our issues in it's "next hard problems"
slide.

Would anyone have any advice, guidance, or resources that might help us out?

Best regards,
Will Anderson

Product Manager @ Case Commons