This ramp is a core part of how everyone experiences artwork in the building, and it’s inherently accessible. (Image credit: Evan-Amos) ( Large preview) A view of the Guggenheim Museum’s iconic interior spiral ramp and atrium. In this museum, all of the exhibits and artworks are arranged around a large, accessible ramp that spirals down through the various levels of the building, as depicted in the image below. Let’s compare this approach to a famous piece of architecture, the Guggenheim museum in New York City. Our accessibility-first approach ensures that accessibility is a core to the chart’s visual design without compromising focus, sacrificing readability, or adding unnecessary chartjunk. This is why we’d like to focus on visual design for now. Believe it or not, the majority of these questions focus on accessible chart colors, encodings, and visual design. Over the past two years, our team has fielded a lot of questions on data accessibility. There are many ways to make data accessible, but for now, let’s focus on our accessibility-first approach to visual design. Through this process, we’ve learned a lot, and it has completely changed the way we think about representing data. To do this right, we typically validate our ideas with an accessibility testing team, and we codesign our solutions with people who have disabilities. Similar to mobile-first, the accessibility first approach considers accessibility requirements and constraints at the very beginning of the design process. An Accessibility-First Approach Led To A Better Visual Design As part of our mission of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible, it’s our responsibility to be good citizens of the web by making data accessible to everyone. For most of these people, the value and insights provided by a chart get lost, and in some cases, the chart provides little-to-no information. These people are typically not relying on assistive technology, like screen readers, to consume web content, and they will be the focus of our case study. We also know that color blindness affects 1 in 12 men worldwide. According to the National Federation of the Blind, 7.6M people in the United States have a vision disability. Visualizations only work well for those who can fully see. The Need For Accessible Data Experiences Data Visualizations Are Ableist We felt strongly that accessibility transcends compliance and that we had an opportunity to create something that is truly useful. However, as we continued to fulfill our mission, we realized our work wasn’t as inclusive as we had hoped, and as we started embracing new accessibility standards, we realized we had more work to do. Our team, a passionate group of designers, researchers and engineers, also wrote Material Design’s data visualization guidelines. Early on, we created several prominently featured visualizations in many Google products. Kai joined shortly after the team was formed. In 2018, Kent was a founding member of Google Cloud’s first dedicated data visualization team. Have you heard the claim that designing for accessibility leads to a better outcome for everyone? Here’s a story about how an accessibility-first approach led to an overall better visual design for a chart. We will also discuss how this approach led us to an unexpected yet better outcome for everyone. Throughout the article, we will highlight how we used the seemingly constraining Web Content Accessibility Standards (WCAG) to become an empowering factor in our design process. Using a data visualization case study, we will explore how an accessibility-first approach led us down the path of creating a better visual design for charts.
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