Making charts accessible for people with visual impairments

So colleagues at Elsevier set out to find a user-friendly way to make these charts and graphs fully accessible. “One of the first design goals we agreed upon was to create a single accessible version of a chart and not a separate accessible version,” said Ted Gies abre em uma nova guia/janela, Elsevier’s User Experience Lead Specialist.

In the case of Scopus – which millions of researchers rely on as the world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer reviewed literature – the system uses a third-party software library, Highcharts abre em uma nova guia/janela, to produce its charts and graphs.

As a result, members of the Scopus technology and product teams feared there wasn't much they could do about the problem. But when they discussed the limitations with Ted, he offered to contact Highsoft, the Norway-based company that makes Highcharts.

Highcharts and other Highsoft products abre em uma nova guia/janela are used by many of the world’s technology leaders, including IBM, Microsoft, GE, Facebook and MasterCard. And when they heard from Ted, they were eager to work with him to find a solution for Elsevier. “Instead of following established solutions, Ted was eager to explore new ideas in an attempt to improve the accessibility experience of charts,” said Øystein Moseng abre em uma nova guia/janela, Core Developer for Highsoft, “and we embarked on a long process of trial, error and user testing to find a better solution.”

In their 8-month collaboration, Ted used his accessibility expertise to guide the creation of an improved system of descriptive tags for charts and graphs that is setting a new industry standard for accessibility.

“This project has sparked a discussion among experts in the field towards more accessible data visualization,” Øystein said. “We are hoping that our work can not only be a concrete improvement to our products but also help bring a new generation of accessibility to charts and graphics on the web."

“This innovation allows me to interact with the chart and understand the relationships of all the components of the chart to all other components rather than just getting a description of the chart,” said Lucy, a Web Accessibility Evangelist for Information Services and Technology (IST) at the University of California, Berkeley abre em uma nova guia/janela. “Charts and graphs are really important for us in academia, and Ted's and Øystein’s work has filled a gap, providing us with a solution we haven't had access to before.”

In her case, being able to interpret charts on her own is saving her time and money while enabling her to come up with an independent interpretation of the visualization.

I used to have to pay a reader or find a volunteer. Somebody else had to be involved, so I had to schedule the time to get the information. Now I can interpret charts on my own.

The other risk you take in using sighted assistance is that the person who’s giving you the information has their own interpretation of the chart, so you’re subject to their bias; you don’t get to form your own opinions on the information.

Hadi Rangin abre em uma nova guia/janela, Highcharts test user and Information Technology Accessibility Specialist for Accessible Technology Services at the University of Washington abre em uma nova guia/janela, said accessibility has come a long way since his early days working with Ted more than a decade ago:

Accessibility was quite new to most designers, developers and administrators at Elsevier at the time Ted started working on it,” Hadi said. “At that time, I was working for the University of Illinois, and both my boss (Dr. Jon Gunderson) and I worked with him very closely to educate him and a few Elsevier designers and developers about accessibility by demonstrating the issues and discussing the potential UX/UI as well as the coding solutions for all the problems we were facing at that time with Elsevier applications. Ted quickly developed a strong passion for accessibility and documented all the lessons learned, which he later put in a nice internal design and coding practice to be used by developers and designers. … We have presented with him about accessibility at the international conferences for many years, and over time he has brought more designers and developers on board, making Elsevier one of the more progressive companies in accessibility.