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

for

From: Will Anderson
Date: Jun 18, 2013 9:58AM

Thanks for the quick responses John and Gabriel. If anyone else has ideas
or resources, please send them on!

John, I'm reading up on sonification right now. It sounds really really
interesting. Would you happen to know any examples where someone has
attempted to 'sonify' a data set of graph? Please feel free to email me
directly off the thread too.

Gabriel, our non-profit was created to build more appropriate technology
for government human services workers so that they could make better policy
decisions and individual family interventions based on data. It's hard to
say exactly what actions a child welfare administrator would take given a
trend as best practice in the child welfare domain is always changing and
always dependent on the context of the local jurisdiction, agency
capability, involved employees, and particularly the family involved.

One hypothetical action an administrator could take, for instance, if they
looked at a chart that showed the number of children in foster care staying
longer than 2 years going up would be to have a conversation with the
social workers working with those children and families to understand if
the child really should be in foster care or if it's time to move toward
either reunification or adoption. Staying in foster care is often the
suboptimal result for the child and seeing that child's experience
comparatively can be a powerful motivator. Again, that's a hypothetical.

In reality, there are dozens of potential useful metrics that should be
referenced in particular circumstances. We're just starting out so we can't
give hard examples of how they're being used to make real world decisions.

Sincere thanks for engaging the question and I appreciate your point about
others dealing with large datasets. Are there any scientists, financial
folks or statisticians on the list who might be able to assist?

Best regards,
Will



On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 11:42 AM, McMorland, Gabriel < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> 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
> > > messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
> > > >



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