10 Accessible visualizations
This chapter covers
- 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 focus on the fun stuff, like selecting a color palette and a font that match the ambiance we want to create 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, 8.2% of the adult population have motor disabilities that can impact their use of a mouse or keyboard. Worldwide, 3.3% of the population have visual impairments, which includes color blindness.[1] But in 2022, only 3% of the internet is accessible to people with disabilities.[2]
In the field of data visualization, we face an additional challenge because visualizations are, by nature, highly visual, and the structure of our projects is less predictable than traditional websites. The good news is that we don’t have to create an identical experience for people with disabilities, but rather an equivalent experience. This means giving them access to the main conclusions people without disabilities can draw from looking at and interacting with our projects. It can also mean providing easy access to the underlying data.