10 Ways to Make Your Graphs More Accessible
Being accessible – meaning making our data visuals interpretable by people with various disabilities – comes up in every one of my workshops.
One of my workshop attendees relayed to me that her company had hired an accessibility consultant who swiftly concluded that, to be accessible, they couldn’t use any graphics.
Your chart title should be a complete sentence that communicates your main takeaway idea from the data. This guideline is so important, it’s the very first item on the Data Visualization Checklist. This is mission critical.
Use language that matches your audience. (This may be a time to use AI to help you plain language your words if you have trouble getting out of your deep well of knowledge.)
Most of the time when people think about accessibility, they’re imaging someone without vision, who is relying on a screen reader to speak aloud the contents on the screen. Full sentence titles are helpful for those folks and we’ll come back to this in a bit.
Consider other disabilities too. People with some cognitive impairments will be benefited by being told what’s up in the chart.
