Impact: Teaching others to recognize the barriers to inaccessible design

Creating accessible online data experiences requires a blend of technical skill, awareness of usability principles, and creative design thinking to communicate effectively with everyone. Our Chartability framework provides guiding questions to help anyone learn to identify and remove barriers in data visualizations and interfaces. By promoting inclusive design, Chartability empowers creators to build data experiences that ensure equal access to information for audiences with disabilities worldwide.
 

We produced Chartability, a set of guidelines and heuristics for evaluating the accessibility of data visualizations.

This work led to...

  • Use in more than 15 government and policy agencies for accessibility and inclusion of people with disabilities, leading to more informed decision-making and better access for the people they serve.  Internationally, Chartability was used to help develop the World Health Organization’s Data Design Language, the European Commission’s Data Visualization Guide, and the Quebec Government’s visualization design system. In the US, we have consulted with (or our work has been used by) the National Institutes of Health’s Common Fund, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, 18f, United States Geological Survey Vizlab, USAID style guide, the United States Web Design System, and non-federal contexts, such as the State of New Jersey's Open Data Center and the State of California's Office of Innovation.
  • Contributions to accessibility curriculum and instruction at universities around the world, helping to teach the next generation how to build more accessible visualizations.  Our research has been used for curriculum on accessibility in data visualization at more than 20 universities, including MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Washington, Gallaudet, and CU Boulder, to name a few.  
  • More accessible data products for industry partners and their customers.  This work has contributed to more accessible data products, services, apps, and platforms at Microsoft (PowerBI, Azure, Github), Apple, Google, Intel, Visa, Adobe, Tableau, Fizz Studio, Jupyter, Canva, and Observable.
  • Produce more accessible data journalism to inform citizens with disabilities around the world.  Our work has been used in collaborations with (and also independent of our involvement) to contribute to more accessible data journalism, visualization, and reporting at the New York Times, the BBC, Reuters, the Pudding, FiveThirtyEight, the 19th, the organization of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), and the Financial Times.
  • More than 50 invited talks and workshops where we had the opportunity to educate thousands of practitioners.  We also contributed to accessible visualization projects including open source communities that serve millions of developers, designers, and researchers internationally. Our work has been used to teach people and ignite new projects in many different groups across the world, including: Data Visualization Society, arXiv, Academic Data Science Alliance, the A11y Project, the Special Olympics, Jupyter Project, Vega-Lite, Data Science By Design group, Graphic Hunters, NovaUX, DataViz DC, A11yViz Group, Outlier, AccessU, Knowbility, DataViz Today, and Linkedin Learning.
     

Supported by:  Fizz Studio, Inc

Timing:  2020 - Present

Related work: 

  • “How accessible is my visualization? Evaluating visualization accessibility with Chartability” [paper pdf]
  • Chartability workbook [link]
  • Follow-up CZI-funded grant to apply our work to Bokeh’s interactive visualization ecosystem [link]

Researchers:  Frank Elavsky, Cynthia Bennett, Dominik Moritz
 

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