I had the pleasure of talking with Jon Schwabish about accessibility in data visualization. The episode was released this week. You can check it out at https://policyviz.com/podcast/episode-169-meagan-longoria/.
If you’ve never thought about accessibility in data visualization before, here is what I want you to know.
- Your explanatory data visualization should be communicating something to your intended audience. You can’t assume people in your intended audience do not have a disability. People with disabilities want to consume data visualizations, too.
- We can’t make everything 100% usable for everyone. But that doesn’t mean we should do nothing. Achieving accessibility is a shared responsibility of the tool maker and the visualization designer. There are several things we can do to increase accessibility using any data visualization tool that don’t require much effort. Regardless of the tool you use, you can usually control things like color contrast, keyboard tab/reading order, and removing or replacing jargon.
- Accessible design may seem foreign or tedious in the beginning. We tend to design for ourselves because that is the user we understand most. But if we start adding tasks like checking color contrast and setting reading order into our normal design routine, it just becomes habit. Over time, those accessible design habits become easier and more intuitive.
I hope that one day accessible design will just be design. You can be part of that effort, whether you are a professional designer, a database administrator just trying to show some performance statistics, or an analyst putting together a report.
Listen to the podcast for my top 5 things you should do to make your data visualizations more accessible.
