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Re: real-world accessible data visualization?

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From: Chaals McCathie Nevile
Date: Nov 29, 2015 7:07PM

On Fri, 13 Nov 2015 06:20:54 +1000, Jennison Mark Asuncion
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Does anyone have an example of a real-world data visualization that
> has been made to be accessible?

Hi Jennison,

I've been poking at SVG and how to make it accessible. I think for a fair
variety of charts we could do quite a lot.

For a start, a lot of charts are really just graphic versions of a list or
table, and adding the relevant aria for those forms can make them directly
accesssible to screenreader users.

I've been playing with various kinds of tree diagram, and marking those up
as lists and using tabindex and links to make them navigable - and faster
to get around, by following a link - seems to be a pretty helpful thing to
do.

There are various libraries that generate SVG, and I am hoping to start
talking to them in the new year about what needs to happen so their stuff
comes out right by default.

On the other hand, I haven't found any solutions that are really really
solid for everyone, beyond linking to a description made of structured
HTML... which of course has its own issues.

You can look at the things I have worked on in the github repository of
the SVG accessibility Community Group - http://github.com/SVG-access-W3CG/

Use-case-examples are some actual worked examples and notes on what I did
- plus a collection of things to work on whenever anyone has some spare
time...

There are also some test cases - svg-a11y-tests has most of them, for
things like getting title and description, whether you can animate them,
keyboard navigation, etc…

And as well as the stuff Brice pointed to, which I haven't had time to
look at, James Nurthen pointed me to a bunch of stuff that Oracle
generates. I think there is work to do on it, but it at least looks like
they have done some and it isn't the horror that many tools generate.

A shout-out to chartist.js who I believe are looking at how to do this,
too. Which would be good - people use their stuff to make charts.

cheers

chaals

--
Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
<EMAIL REMOVED> - - - Find more at http://yandex.com