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Re: Making graphs built from large datasets accessible - helprequested

for

From: McMorland, Gabriel
Date: Jun 18, 2013 9:42AM

As a blind person, I'm very interested in these problems of communicating complex ideas between the blind and sighted worlds. Unfortunately, I don't have a solution.

What do users need to do with the information displayed in the data visualization?

How do successful blind professionals navigate complex information or big data sets? There must be a blind scientist, financial analyst, or statistician who has adapted their own techniques for communicating about big data.



-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Will Anderson
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 11:07 AM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] Making graphs built from large datasets accessible - help requested

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