How to Make Your Data More Accessible & Inclusive

When your charts are hard to read, navigate, or interpret, you may unintentionally exclude people with visual, cognitive, or physical differences. The good news? A few simple tweaks can make your visualizations dramatically more inclusive—without sacrificing impact. Below are three practical ways to start, each with links to deeper dives from past 60-Second Data Tips.

1. Design with Color Blindness in Mind

About 1 in 20 people live with some form of color vision deficiency. Relying solely on color to differentiate data points leaves these viewers behind. Use texture, shape, or labels—not just color—to distinguish categories. Also, tools like Color Oracle can help simulate how those with color blindness see your work, and you can generate an accessible color palette using an online tool like this one from Venngage.

Read more: How To Make Your Data Viz More Accessible: Color Blindness

2. Size Text for Readability

Small fonts and tight spacing are common in data visuals—but they create major accessibility barriers, especially for older adults or users with low vision. The rule of thumb is: Text must not be smaller than 9 points in size. And always test readability at 100% zoom—especially on dashboards.

Read more: What's The Right Text Size to Make Data Viz Accessible?

3. Structure for Screen Readers & Keyboard Navigation

If your charts are embedded in websites or reports, they should be usable by people who rely on screen readers or keyboard controls. You can make your data visualizations more screen reader- and keyboard-friendly by reducing the number of marks and adding text that clarifies the content of the visualization.

Read more: How To Make Your Data Viz More Accessible: Screen Readers and Keyboard Navigation

Let’s talk about YOUR data!

Got the feeling that you and your colleagues would use your data more effectively if you could see it better? Data Viz for Nonprofits (DVN) can help you get the ball rolling with an interactive data dashboard and beautiful charts, maps, and graphs for your next presentation, report, proposal, or webpage. Through a short-term consultation, we can help you to clarify the questions you want to answer and goals you want to track. DVN then visualizes your data to address those questions and track those goals.

What's The Difference Between An Infographic and A Data Visualization?

Reposted from April 2018

Infographic and data visualization often are used interchangeably. And, indeed, the distinction is not hard and fast. They both focus on showing rather than telling. They explain something using more visual cues than words or numbers and so take advantage of our visual superpowers. (For more on these superpowers, see Tip #1.) The difference is that an infographic is more of a story, and a data visualization is more of a tool.

An infographic typically uses images to lead the viewer through a story. Some of those images might be visualizations of data. For example, the point of this infographic is to highlight aspects of a nonprofit workforce shortage. Infographics are usually meant to explain or show something to people who are not all that familiar with the topic.

A data visualization, unlike an infographic, uses visual cues (shape, color, size, etc.) primarily to represent data. Think bar chart, line graph, pie chart, and maps. And though the creators of the data visualization may have a story they want to tell, the viewer can use the visualization to discern any number of stories.

For example, on the quadrants chart below, each circle represents an educational strategy. The strategies are plotted along two measures: how much importance educators place on the strategies and how often they put these strategies into practice. We can use this chart as a tool to decide what to do next. Clearly, most of the educators represented in the data already feel these strategies are important. But they use most of the tactics less than 50 percent of the time. So we need not waste time explaining the value of the strategies to them. Instead, we should determine what is preventing them from implementing the strategies.

If you are looking to tell a specific story particularly to an outside audience, consider an infographic. If you are looking for a tool to explore data, consider a data visualization.

 
 

Let’s talk about YOUR data!

Got the feeling that you and your colleagues would use your data more effectively if you could see it better? Data Viz for Nonprofits (DVN) can help you get the ball rolling with an interactive data dashboard and beautiful charts, maps, and graphs for your next presentation, report, proposal, or webpage. Through a short-term consultation, we can help you to clarify the questions you want to answer and goals you want to track. DVN then visualizes your data to address those questions and track those goals.

Ideas You Should Steal From This Viz (Installment 13)

“All creative work builds on what came before.” —Austin Kleon in Steal Like An Artist.

Today I offer up another steal-worthy interactive viz that I came across in the Tableau Public Gallery. Scroll down to see what you should steal from it.

Source: Nir Smilga on Tableau Public

Here’s what I suggest you steal from this viz:

  • Small Multiples. To highlight each country and to allow for easy comparisons across countries, Smilga created one small chart per country and placed them alongside each other, aka a “small multiples chart.”

  • Gray comparison trends. While Smilga highlights the trend for the featured country in each chart using color, the trends for other countries are also in each chart but in a light gray. This allows us to easily compare the trend for the featured country to that of others in general.

  • Color distinguishes trend types. Recent downward trends are highlighted in red, and recent upward trends are highlighted in blue.

  • Choose your view. Smilga allows the viewer to customize the view by selecting the number of columns, time period, and countries shown.

To see past data tips, click HERE.

Let’s talk about YOUR data!

Got the feeling that you and your colleagues would use your data more effectively if you could see it better? Data Viz for Nonprofits (DVN) can help you get the ball rolling with an interactive data dashboard and beautiful charts, maps, and graphs for your next presentation, report, proposal, or webpage. Through a short-term consultation, we can help you to clarify the questions you want to answer and goals you want to track. DVN then visualizes your data to address those questions and track those goals.