This chapter covers
- Understanding how people with disabilities navigate web content
- Providing easy-to-read text and instructions
- Ensuring sufficient color contrast and using double-encoding
- Allowing proper navigation to screen reader users
- Accessing interactions with a keyboard
When designing and developing data visualizations, we tend to focus on the fun stuff, such as selecting a color palette and a font that match a specific look-and-feel or developing delightful, out-of-the-box interactions and animations. But many of us fail to give accessibility the consideration it deserves.
In the United States, 26% of adults live with a disability and 4.9% have a vision disability that requires screen readers (see Geoff Cudd, “57 Web Accessibiity Statistics,” https://ddiy.co/web-accessibility-statistics). But in 2022, only 3% of the internet is accessible to people with disabilities (see David Moradi, “What’s Next for Digital Accessibility,” http://mng.bz/X10M).