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Beyond “Alt-Text”: Creating Accessible Data Visualizations with Code

Published:12 October 2021Publication History

ABSTRACT

Data visualization is a reliable tool for professional communication practitioners for synthesizing and presenting data to a variety of audiences. However, data visualizations have a range of accessibility concerns including: visual acuity, color/contrast difficulties, color blindness and size/scale issues. Alt-text is not enough to make these visuals accessible and therefore more advanced web coding techniques, such as the Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) format should be used to create data visualizations for the web. The use of SVG allows for greater coded semantic and contextual information to be added to data visualizations resulting in graphics that can be better interacted with by users with a variety of accessibility software.

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  • Published in

    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGDOC '21: Proceedings of the 39th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication
    October 2021
    402 pages
    ISBN:9781450386289
    DOI:10.1145/3472714

    Copyright © 2021 ACM

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    • Published: 12 October 2021

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