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Re: [EXTERNAL]Hiding inaccessible charts from screen readers?

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From: Mark Magennis
Date: Aug 26, 2019 6:41AM

I agree with Glen and Jared. The way you might approach this is to think "might a sighted user just glance at the chart and get the information they need from that rather than reading the data table?". If they might just glance at the chart, then ask yourself "what is the essential information they will get from glancing at the chart?". If you can get this across in a sentence then this might give you your succinct, high level alternative text. It could be something like "sales increased sharply from $2.2m between 2000 and 2010 remaining steady around $6m until 2016 and declined to $5.2m in 2017". If you think this is essentially what the chart is there to get across then you're in business. But if you think there is much more essential info than this but still not so much that you can't get it across in a paragraph, then consider writing that paragraph.

If you can do this, it will make it much easier for a user to understand than having to read through a data table.

Mark

Mark Magennis
Skillsoft | mobile: +353 87 60 60 162
Accessibility Specialist


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Jared Smith
Sent: 24 August 2019 19:59
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [WebAIM] Hiding inaccessible charts from screen readers?

> You don't necessarily have to hide the chart. You could have alternative
> text for the chart that is a brief summary and then say a table of data
> follows the chart.

This is what I'd recommend. I think a very succinct, high level
alternative text is useful for the chart itself, then the full
alternative comes below. This is the approach we take with our survey
result articles, such as at
https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/

Jared