[BlindMath] Presenting charts and data online

Lucas Nadolskis nadol012 at umn.edu
Mon Aug 9 15:02:19 UTC 2021


Couldn’t agree more.
I remember seeing various articles about the number  of covid cases per state in the USA and when I open them it was all graphs.
That would be quite simply presented as a list with the name of the state and the number of cases.
I believe they want to use color representation since it is more appealing to viewers.

Thanks for your initiative of emailing the BBC that is such a great idea.


Kind regards.

Lucas Nadolskis.
 

> On Aug 9, 2021, at 5:13 AM, Robin Williams via BlindMath <blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi all, and with apologies for the cross-posting ...
> 
> I have been growing increasingly frustrated by the amount of information that is hidden from us in charts and graphics on popular public websites, such as the BBC. Take for example this BBC News summary of the IPCC climate change report published today:
> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58130705
> There are a couple of very lazy uses of alt text here, an infographic labelled 'infographic' and a chart labelled 'chart'. The BBC have been criminal with such lazy uses of alt text, particularly during the pandemic, during which the importance of data and charts in the public discourse has arguably never been more important. I'm going to contact the BBC and encourage them to try harder, but wondered in what forms people would like to see data presented. For me, for a simple scatter diagram, a short description in the alt text will usually suffice. I'm less sure about infographics though. And what about more complicated representations of data? I recall some cool work done by Jonathan G and a collaborator a while ago which provided access to histograms in a convenient online format, and there are also tools such as the SAS Graphics Accelerator. Would people like to see access to those types of tools used more widely in the public domain? I for one would.
> 
> Any thoughts appreciated.
> 
> Bests,
> Robin
> 
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