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Re: Making graphs built from large datasets accessible - help requested

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From: John Hicks
Date: Jun 18, 2013 9:35AM

The solution to this is "sonification" surely.

Sonification has been around for a long time, but in terms of web
accessibility it has not been really exploited.

I'd love to be involved in something like that . In fact, I almost feel
silly posting to the list instead of mailing you privately and proposing we
start a company... but it is not new stuff, it is just the application of
it that is new (and maybe not even).

What is sonification? It is creating aural "soundscapes" of visual data.


It would take some getting used to, but would be a great norm if it caught
on (also providing mouse-driven extra dimensions on 2d graphics viewed by
non visually impaired people)... thinking out loud here. ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonification

Interesting, let's go further!

Who's in?

best wishes all,

John


On Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:07:12 -0400, Will Anderson < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:
> 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
> > >