2024-12-07 –, Main Stream
Language: English
Visualizing our data helps us better explore and understand it, and communicate findings and insights. However, not all data visualizations are accessible to everyone, particularly individuals with disabilities, such as visual impairments or cognitive challenges.
In this talk, we’ll discuss some principles and best practices for creating more accessible data visualizations. It will include tips for data scientists and analysts who create visualizations, as well as guidelines for the developers of visualization software to provide accessibility affordances in their libraries.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 1.3 billion people (i.e., 1 in 6 individuals) experience a disability, and nearly 2.2 billion people (1 in 5 individuals) have vision impairment. Improving the accessibility of visualizations will enable more people to participate and engage with our data analyses.
In this talk, we will:
- Examine accessibility fundamentals of visual elements such as color contrast, alternative text descriptions, keyboard navigation support, screen reader compatibility, and more
- Incorporate these into our data visualizations with practical tips and specific example for common plots
- Understand the accessibility limitations of widely used Python data visualization tools and libraries, and outline ways to improve them
This talk is inspired by the accessibility audit and improvements we’re working in the Bokeh visualization library, a tool to create interactive visualizations in web browsers. The talk will include learnings from on ongoing work.
We hope this talk enables you to make your next data visualization, and your visualization tools, more accessible.
Pavithra Eswaramoorthy is a Developer Advocate at Quansight, where she works to improve the developer experience and community engagement for several open source projects in the PyData community.
Currently, she maintains the Bokeh visualization library, and contributes to the Nebari (adjacent to the Jupyter community), conda-store (part of the conda ecosystem), and Ragna (RAG orchestration framework) projects.
Pavithra has been involved in the open source community for over 5 years, notable as a maintainer of the Dask library and an administrator for Wikimedia’s OSS programs.
In her spare time, she enjoys a good book and hot coffee. :)