[BlindRUG] Presenting charts and data online

[Liz Hare]

Hi Robin,

I really agree with you about the inaccessibility of media data visualization. I've always needed access to it for my work, but it seems more and more that it's necessary for responsible citizenship as well, between covid and recent important elections. Here in the States, it's government as well, both at the Federal and New York State levels.

I'm going to list some resources that you might want to point out when you contact the BBC.

Here's a link to the Chartability project on GitHub:
https://github.com/Chartability/POUR-CAF

Frank Elavsky has created this accessibility audit for data visualization with input from data visualization and accessibility experts. There's a more general website at:
https://chartability.fizz.studio

It's incredibly detailed and technical.  It focuses more on the kinds of visualizations that can actually be made accessible rather than alt-text.

At the other end of the spectrum, there's this brief but very useful article:
https://medium.com/nightingale/writing-alt-text-for-data-visualization-2a218ef43f81

Also, Silvia Canelón and I did a small study on #TidyTuesday submissions. TidyTuesday is a weekly activity on Twitter where a data set is assigned and people practice making data visualizations based on that data. We looked at how many of the submissions had alt-text, how that changed over time, and I came up with a rubric to determine how complete they are.  The slides in the GitHub repo are at:
https://spcanelon.github.io/csvConf2021/slides/indexLH.html#1
The GitHub repo, which contains accessibility resources in the README.md file, is:
https://github.com/spcanelon/csvConf2021
The talk is at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxLkv2iRdf8

I hope these  help and I'm looking forward to see if anyone else has suggestions.

Liz


> On Aug 9, 2021, at 5:10 AM, Robin Williams via BlindRUG <blindrug at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
>  
> This isn’t related to the use of R, at least not directly, but I hoped people on this list might have some useful comments. 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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