Episode 63: How to Integrate Accessibility into Your Data Viz Workflow — Featuring Frank Elavsky
Frank Elavsky
Welcome to episode 63 of Data Viz Today. What can we do to make our data visualizations more accessible to more people, especially those with disabilities?
In this episode, Frank Elavsky shares how we can integrate accessibility into our current data visualization workflow. It’s a skill just like anything else, so let’s get practicing!
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, SoundCloud & Spotify.
illustration of coffee pouring into a cup with the acronym POUR CAF which stands for perceivable, operable, understandable, robust, compromising, assistive, flexible
TRANSCRIPT:
Alli Torban:
Hey, you're listening to episode 63 of data viz today. I'm Alli Torban and this show is here to help you become a more effective information designer. Thanks for joining me today. We're speaking with Frank Elavsky about designing more accessible data visualizations, and Frank is a data viz engineer at visa, and he is on a mission to make data visualizations, data experiences, more accessible. What does that mean? Basically? That the experience can.
Alli Torban:
Be experienced by everyone, including those with disabilities. And if you're like me, when someone says accessibility and data is you think, oh, well, I've read up on colorblindness. So what is, what else is there really well a lot actually, but if you're working in data is you have a lot on your plate. I know you do. You're probably already stretched thin trying to learn the next technology. So when people bring up accessibility, the thought of learning a whole new skill can be really intimidating.
Alli Torban:
And this was exactly my line of thought, but you know, I've been following Frank and other accessibility advocates on Twitter, and I can now see that this is a skill that's really important for me to start investing my time in, because you've heard me on this podcast go on and on about focusing on your audience. What do they need? How can we commute, communicate better with them? And it turns out, Frank told me that estimates are around 25% of people have some form of disability. And that kind of seems high at first, right? Well, disabilities can come in many forms. They're often not visible to us and it can be something you're born with something you develop over time, something that's temporary like an injury, or you're nursing a baby for half the day. It can be something physical, it can be cognitive. And when you start thinking about disabilities like this, you realize that 25% doesn't really seem that high anymore.
Alli Torban:
And it actually kind of seems low. So if we're really going to put our audience first, that doesn't mean leaving out at least a quarter of them. And Frank, he knows this is hard. This is hard work. And there aren't many ex resources out there for of practitioners. And that's why he built one. He created a freely downloadable audit checklist called chart ability. That's organized across seven principles that can get you started checking your database for the top 10 accessibility checks. Plus you can extend to the full list of 45 items to run through for a more robust check. And when I talked to Frank, I realized how important it is to be familiar with this list before you get started on your visits, because a lot of things are harder to change after the fact. So I asked Frank to join me on the show today to give us some tips on integrating accessibility into our database workflow. So our data visualizations can be accessible to more people. Here's Frank.
Frank Elavsky:
I know, I know accessibility is the right thing to do. And I always knew that. And so is this thing itching in the back of my head like, oh, I really should explore this topic. It's like CSS, right? Anybody who knows, has really seen somebody who's excellent at CSS is like, Ooh, I really would love to like actually discover some of the secrets there. And accessibility is a skill like everything else. And it's a skill that really, honestly, almost everybody should be practicing. Right. And it's just something that I wanted to explore. Cause I also had a pretty good instinct that it would be difficult work and also rewarding. So you know, I, myself am disabled and it just didn't even really click until maybe a year after working on accessibility that like, oh, like I have like a lot of personal stake in the greater cause that is accessibility. My disability doesn't affect how I interact with technology generally. But so it was actually ironically invisible to me people's needs. So and that's often why people don't think about accessibility because you know, other people's needs are, are invisible to us.
Alli Torban:
Yeah. And so you started getting into accessibility and now it's going to be an even bigger part of your future, right?
Frank Elavsky:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So a recent project that I worked on is chartability, which is a framework for auditing data visualizations. And it's been a huge effort for the past year, in my spare time and in a very interesting roundabout kind of way while working on that, one of the people I collaborated with was a researcher and they encouraged me to get a PhD and which is a pretty absurd suggestion considering, you know, I'm very comfy. I have an industry job. Why would I want to make almost a Medea, just suffer for like five years. But there's also a huge appeal to that as well, because I can now have a lot of freedom to do the things I've been doing in my spare time which is exploring kind of the deeper issues in this space. And I can do that as part of like, you know, just what I do. That's the content of my PhD.
Alli Torban:
What are you hoping to accomplish with the PhD?
Frank Elavsky:
Well, I want to temper my expectations because I know, you know, what I really want to accomplish is pushing global standards. That's my ultimate goal. And so having kind of a set of standards to evaluate data visualization specifically that is sort of the ultimate goal. And there's a lot of unanswered questions in that space data visualization as a practice, sometimes butt heads, butts heads with accessibility, best practices. So it's, it's, there's a of tension in that space and I think somebody needs to come in and really explore some of those things, get actual users with disabilities to test out all these things in these spaces. Have participants come in and maybe suggest new standards and then kind of build up enough of a, a, a convincing argument to have them adopted by vocab. That's sort of the goal.
Alli Torban:
Yeah. That sounds really exciting. Having some sort of global standard, you've been talking a lot about accessibility lately, like talking to like user groups and trying to express your message. And I was kind of curious what kind of research boxes you've been getting. Like, it seems like to me there's maybe, I don't know, maybe three attitudes about accessibility, like you're ignorant, right? Maybe you just don't really know what I think that's probably, most people just don't really know what they should be doing. And then you have maybe people who kind of know, but they don't think it's that big of a problem. So they're not making it a priority. And then maybe you have people who think it's a great, you know, it's a big priority and they want to do it, but maybe they don't know how to do it, or don't have the resources or the backing from their company. Is that kind of the three groups you've seen or is there something else there's a little nuance
Frank Elavsky:
To the middle category? I think that there's, there's like a, actually an unfortunately common pretty large demographic of visualization practitioners who actually do not think accessibility should be involved in database and specifically making data visualization accessible to people who are blind or low vision. It's, I think a philosophical problem for some people to think about making data and data experiences accessible to people who cannot see or have difficulty seeing. And so there's actually a decent camp of people who are just resistant to that idea. Unfortunately I'd love to maybe specifically have some kind of talker forum where I could convince them, otherwise may take a little bit of work, but
Alli Torban:
The is the idea that Hey, data is, is, you know, the whole idea behind it is that you're supposed to be able to see something that you can't wouldn't be able to see in a table or something. So why, why would we bring that out of, or what, what are you supposed to do after that? If you're, if the point is to see it, is that
Frank Elavsky:
Yeah, I think that people view data visualization as the solution to a problem. And it actually is a solution that participates and a pretty big problem space, which is gaining insight from data and that kind of practice of learning from data, finding insights, communicating data. But yeah, I think, I think when people actually experience a good like data experience, that's holistic it's actually pretty easy to convince them otherwise, but it just takes a few good examples. It really just one strong example of where data visualization isn't enough on its own is you see in the newsroom in data driven journalism, I have never seen an article that is only visual. There's always a textual accompany mint that you have context before, a figure after figure during a figure and like a scrolly telling experience, you have texts that's flying along as you scroll. And that textual accompaniment is it is actually inherently like a primitive that comes before a visual, like how, how we talk about the data is like this core activity. It's quite accessible if we were to really explore that. And it works really well with video.
Alli Torban:
It was really interesting to me in accessibility for database, I assumed like everybody else we're talking about colorblindness and maybe contrast, I don't know, but you know, like you're normally thinking of visual, visual things and the idea that disability can come in a lot of different forms, like you know, you can be permanently disabled, you can be temporarily disabled, can be situationally disabled. Can you talk a little bit about what, what people know you're seeing people normally think of as a disability and what that actually looks like in real life?
Frank Elavsky:
Yeah, I think the very first thing that a lot of people have to overcome in this space like from an intellectual perspective, understanding disability is overcoming the idea of the medical model of disability and also, and understanding the social model and just a very briefly kind of walk through it. The medical model looks at disability as sort of a characteristic of a person, and it is solved by you know, the medical model solves problems by prescribing drugs or giving treatment. You affect change on the body of the person disabled and that model it's helpful in some ways, but it's also really, really limited. And the social model of disability looks at context and someone's relationship to their environment as a place where disability is produced. You are disabled because a curb keeps you as a wheelchair user from accessing a sidewalk or a street.
Frank Elavsky:
And so when you think about the social and the social model is really about enacting change on your environment, not just the person, right? The two you know, there's like a pretty rich history of tension between these two spaces and they're both very important. And when you, then, you know, that we're talking back in the seventies, the social model really started to take hold and you know, it's come through a pretty rich history, the ADA eh, you know, a section five oh eight, a lot of laws have come about because of the social model, because the social model looks to change laws, not just people who are disabled, right? So once you understand that distinction, then you can start to think about the dimensions of disability, which there are functional types of disability. You may not be able to see. You may not be able to hear, you may have a motor impairment.
Frank Elavsky:
You can't, you know, it's a touch type of thing. Cognitive. so there are categories of functional disabilities. And I think a lot of people can understand those categories or maybe even already familiar with it, but the rubber really hits the road. When you start to consider context and your environment, and that's where you have a temporal dimension to disability. There are people who are permanently disabled. They were born without an arm or they lost an arm. They were born with they were born blind or they lost their eyesight, right. And it's going to be that way. They're going to live with this disability. That'd be permanent. There are some people though who are temporarily disabled. And in fact, most people, at some point in their lives who have probably experienced a temporary disability, maybe you break an arm, you can only use one arm for six months or you have a surgery on your eye.
Frank Elavsky:
So now you lose, you know depth and you know, a lot of perceptual awareness, et cetera, but that's also limited. You'll eventually he'll get, you know your eyesight back. And then the third dimension of time here is what we call situational. And we don't really call it a disability. At least in modern, you know, the way we talk about disciplines today, disability is usually reserved for the first two. But the third one, though, it still actually falls within the same umbrella of accessibility, which is you will have a situational impairment or a situational exclusion. This might be, it can be very simple. You're using your phone on a sunny day. It's very bright out your phone. Can't quite adjust for the contrast needed. And you can't really see your screen. You, the environment, the world around you has produced a situation where you're now no longer able to use something or accurately see something or a logo contrast data.
Frank Elavsky:
Visualization is very hard to see your little mobile device, right? And when you start to think about situational limitations, 100% of people, and almost really on a daily basis, we experienced these little things all the time and everyone at some point in your life will experience a situational limitation and probably actually far more frequently than that. And when, so when you design for accessibility you know, people like to throw out stats like a quarter of all people in the United States report, having some form of disability, generally, we're talking about permanent disability there. So if you want to make a business case for being accessible, you'd say you're only going to be 75% effective with your market, you know because you're missing out on a quarter of all people, but then when you start thinking about temporary disability, okay, well, we don't really have data for that, but probably a lot of people are just temporarily have some difficulty using things. And so we'll throw maybe like, I don't know, five, 10% on the, you know, your market viability and then you think situational limitations. Okay. Now everybody from the CEO to of a company to, you know, any given employee is, you know, is going to benefit from your own products, being accessible, let alone every single customer you would want to reach accessible experiences, often bleed into usable experiences and really making something accessible is the ground of usability. Yeah.
Alli Torban:
I, I totally understand that. I mean, anybody who's had a baby can tell you,
Frank Elavsky:
Yes, absolutely. I,
Alli Torban:
Oh my gosh, I was still working and like, you know, baby, the nurse all the time, I was on the computer with one hand. So so much, I mean, probably half the time I was on the computer, I had a baby in one hand nursing, or just sitting there sleeping something. Not so many times I was thinking it would be great if I could just tab over to this thing. Now I've got to keep going back to the mouse and the keyboard. And it's, it's totally true. And I can totally see how once you shift your mind from, oh, you know, colorblindness affects, you know, what is it, two to 5% or something it's not, it's a pretty low thing. And, oh, it's mostly men, whatever, once you get past that, you're like, wow. Thinking about these things and making visualizations more accessible for like the temporal, the cognitive situational, all that stuff. It's it's, I mean, it's basically everybody. Yeah. Everybody. Okay. Let's, let's help. We convinced everyone. Yes, we are in the camp now where we want, we want to make us a priority. You developed an auditing tool that free completely downloadable I'll link in the show notes. People can just walk through this audit tool and kind of grade them, their visualization and see places where they can improve to make their visualization more accessible. Is that about right?
Frank Elavsky:
Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things that's very difficult, I think about data visualization and accessibility that I already hinted at is there there's a lot of unknowns or things where you maybe would have to spend two or three years working full time in this space to get, to get some pretty reasonable ideas of what's right and wrong. And after doing this work enough I decided to compile these things every now and then I would have to audit in my spare time, I would just volunteer to kind of check something out for somebody's test to see if something's successful and I wanted to be consistent. So I started to write down all of the things that I did and most of them early on or straight from web standards. And I just focus the tests and the audit on things right out of what CAC, so straight from compliance type of audit.
Frank Elavsky:
And, and nobody had done that before for database. Right. Because it's pretty hard. Like there's, I think 118, maybe. I don't know how many, oh, sorry. Visas VR has 125, I think in what keg, it's like 70 something tests that you have to test for and not all of them are actually relevant for database. Right. So it's like, you're just sifting to try and find like, oh, oh, contrast. Yeah. That'll apply to database. You're trying to find the things that matter. So I just made a list of all the things that I think matter. And then I made a list of all the things that aren't in standards that definitely shouldn't matter, like really, really important things to have in there too. And that's kind of how charitability was born so to speak.
Alli Torban:
And it's kind of broken up into different sections. Can you kind of give an overview of what the sections are and what you're checking for in each of the sections?
Frank Elavsky:
Yeah. w w web accessibility initiative, which is the group that created what CAG you know, they have a lot of like their stuff has been adopted by, you know, more that, you know, I think like a hundred and something countries worldwide, right? So like their accessibility standards influence you know, law and that affect like four or 5 billion people worldwide. So it's a good place to start, right. I didn't want to reinvent the wheel. And so I organized initially chargeability into four sections P O you are poor and it's common. Anybody in the accessibility space probably knows about poor it's the four accessibility heuristic principles, and they are perceivable, operable, understandable, robust, and that acronym spells poor. And I broke the fourth one robust into three additional categories because there's so much in robustness. When you talk about like complex data interfaces and systems that I created three kind of new subcategories, I was inspired by inclusive design principles to kind of come up with three new pillars.
Frank Elavsky:
So I came up with compromising assistive and flexible. So it, it spells poor calf, a P O U R C a F. Those are the kinds of organizations under charitability. You think of like pouring yourself a cup of coffee. And I am a big fan of coffee. So I have a little like coffee logo, I think, in the, in the charter ability book to hopefully find that make people think of coffee. So yeah, each TA, each section focuses on kind of really exploring that principle with like not a binary test, like pass fail, but it's pretty close. Like there's very little room for ambiguity on some of them. And then other tests there is, you know, it's sometimes unclear if you failed or succeeded, but for the most part there's anywhere between, I think, five and 10 or 12 little tests in each of the pillars.
Frank Elavsky:
And they're all, there are a wide range of different types of tests. Some of them will take practice for people who haven't done it before, like using a screen reader. Number one, most common thing people ask me is how do I use a screen reader with data is, and most of the time data is, are not in any way set up for screen reader. So it just literally will not work at all. So yeah, navigating, learning those, those necessary skills you need is a little tricky sometimes, but some of the tests are, are very, very easy.
Alli Torban:
Yeah. Yeah. Looking through here, it seems like some of them you know, like at the beginning, it starts out with, you know, the tech sizes too small, low contrast colorblind, safe colors, things that people are probably pretty familiar with when you're going, when people are going through these and trying to decide if their visualization passes or fails or they need to work on it. What I like is that it, it's kind of a conversation starter for some of them, you know, you can start talking to people, well, shouldn't be BB doing this. But you know, I can see how sometimes you think, well, oh, this question isn't particularly it's not relevant to our tour situation. But that could be arguable depending on what the situation is. Do you have any suggestions on when you're having that conversation? If someone's trying to say, oh, we don't need that.
Frank Elavsky:
Yeah. Do you mean like a specific test or like chargeability in general? Like accessibility?
Alli Torban:
Yeah. Like a specific one. Like, I don't know. The current view path is not easy to understand or to return to. And it's like, well, we don't need that. And someone else's like, well, maybe we do, you know, like how do you work through
Frank Elavsky:
That? So it depends on where a project is at. And I've had, I I've done audits where it's early design and they want to have something where it's like a complex kind of dashboard where you're diving into certain areas and certain charts when you interact with them, we'll load new things somewhere else. And if you can interact in some way and dig yourself deep into a hole, if that's what you're, the designers really want, then yes, that test is relevant. Even if you don't already have that feature yet, you're expecting to have it. So I would mark it as a failure until the designers have proven in the designs a way to make that a success. So, but there are some things like, you know, a static or maybe not a static, but say in data-driven journalism, it's usually like a single article.
Frank Elavsky:
You have a couple charts in it, right? There's no like view path. That's custom. It's not like clicking the chart or some UI element gets you some to some other place. And so that's not as big of a deal. And plus it's on the web. So the URL is kind of its own little breadcrumb. It could, it could be argued that, you know, just living on that, that space is fine. So you just say non applicable, right. There are some situations like that, but all of the ones marked critical are ones that are mostly applicable. Like almost all the time in every vis. It's not that the critical ones are somehow more important than the other tests because every test is important. But it's that they're almost always going to be relevant. They are often failures and some of them they're marked critical only because they're so expensive to remediate. They take so much time to fix that issue. And it's just better to do it upfront.
Alli Torban:
Yeah. Reading through these. I can definitely see. I mean, it's very comprehensive and I can see how it, it just makes the experience better for everyone. Even if you don't have any of the disabilities that we talked about, like my favorite one is scrolling experiences cannot be adjusted or opted out of because I'm going to out myself here. I do not like scrolling, telling I've never said that before, but I do not like it. I'm sorry. I just don't like it. And I think I think it was maybe Amber Thomas. Yeah. She, because of your, your thing, she she put an option in there to opt out of a scrolling, telling us I'm opting out of this scrolling telling, just give it to me.
Frank Elavsky:
That's awesome.
Alli Torban:
So I am loving this, but do you think that you could just walk us through, I don't know, two or three items on here that you feel like do this today, if you don't feel like you have time to like, look through this whole thing and maybe you're not interested, just give me two or three things that I can walk away with that I can start implementing in my visualizations today.
Frank Elavsky:
Absolutely. So number one, most important thing to get right early, because it is so difficult to fix later if you do not is keyboard and screen reader accessibility. So making sure that if you have a chart that it's interactive, so you can click it with a mouse or you can hover and get special tools of information, anything like that, if it's in any way interactive with the mouse, it must also be interactive with a keyboard and whatever the information is in the element or in a tool tip, it has you have an aria label or all texts description that reveals that info. And I actually hope, and this is going to be disappointing, I think for a lot of specialty interaction designers out there who in the vis space. But if, if you don't know how to do that, I would suggest in the design phase of a project, not having interactive charts try and reveal the information in some other way, because it's, it is a pretty significant undertaking if you've never done it before. It's very good to do. If you, if you actually get that work done, you'll learn a lot about the space of how to work with screen readers, how to make something keyboard accessible. So that's the number one thing, because it's a huge undertaking. Yeah. That's significant. I mean,
Alli Torban:
I can hear myself listening to this episode thinking immediately thinking, well, I don't even know if Tableau like will let me do that kind of stuff.
Frank Elavsky:
Yeah. So Tableau, if you can hover and get a special set of tool, tip information on a given geometry, there's no way to get, get to that. If you're a sighted keyboard only user. So that means you're a user. You have your eyes, you use your eyes to understand content, but you say, when we say keyboard only the keyboard interface is a way for a lot of people with motor impairments to interact. Yeah. It Tableau doesn't doesn't do well for keyboard only. And especially for like element level stuff. There's no easy way. Christy martini's exploring this space. So keep your eyes and ears peeled for what he's up to. He's kind of doing a blog series. I audited his stuff.
Alli Torban:
Yeah. But I can, I can see how it did, if you at least have that in mind, you can be, like you said, either, you know, just make it so that the information in there isn't, you know, the only place that it is, or you have kind of an alternate version or something.
Frank Elavsky:
Yep. Don't if exactly, if you don't know how to make it accessible in the element itself or with a keyboard or whatever, have an alternate place where this information lives, where that's easy to get to. And isn't Fu skated by like some crazy huge dataset or a lot of work, don't make it hard. Okay. So that's the first one and that's big. That's a lot of work like any, there aren't very many people who know how to do this. It's a high area of expertise. So, and I, and I think the data visualization space, especially what done with interactive is over the past five, 10 years, we have the skills to do it. We just need to do it. A lot of people, you know, have done pretty amazing things with interactive is, and it's not a difficult step to just take it all away and be accessible.
Frank Elavsky:
So that's the first one. The second one is surprisingly pretty easy and it captures an enormous amount of accessibility issues. And that is text treatment. This one, I cannot believe how many people fail, but I always, I always start off with executive summaries are more accessible. Every visit that you have should have a title that explains the outcome of the vis. And you might think, well, why would I make a chart if I'm just going to give you the answer in one sentence, people love to have like very clever titles for things that kind of like they're, they're trying to like hook you in, like, it's click baity almost. Don't do that. Just literally give the answer in the title. It's more accessible. Imagine every chart you make is for a CEO who does not have the time and imagine, and this people don't like this, either imagine every title and summary you give to every chart could replace the chart.
Frank Elavsky:
If, if you had to, and that's going to be a very accessible experience, it turns out a lot of people with cognitive disabilities, with visual disabilities and people without time people just with limited time, they prefer a text summary in plain text language that is massive. Like truly the data is space. Data-Driven journalism actually does this one. Well, most of the time they kick butts. So if you want to just know who's doing good in this space, you know, look at the big, the big people out there. Yeah. That one's huge dashboards in particular are very bad at that. They'll just have charts, like 10 charts laid out and there's like almost no texts. And it's like the most nightmarish thing ever. Yeah. Very, very, very inaccessible. The third one, the third thing I tell people it's a little tricky in, in some ways to like get it right.
Frank Elavsky:
But it will capture a lot of other accessibility options as well. And that's high contrast design by default. And this is not something people should have to turn on by default, your visualization should pass minimum requirement levels set by what CAC, you can have like a super sleek, like crazy sexy mode you turn on. And it's like very low contrast minimalists. That's fine if you want that. But that needs to be opted into, as opposed to the opposite. By default, you should have at least a three to one contrast ratio, hopefully have a link to just what kegs contrast checker. You should use that calculation. There's several tools. You can get eyedropper tools, whatever plugins for design tools and stuff too. So if they do one for all charging on the trees,
Alli Torban:
Three to one for chart geometries, and that's like the bar in the bar chart is that right? And access
Frank Elavsky:
Lines, anything that is not text that is meaningful.
Alli Torban:
And then what, and then what's the contrast for text
Frank Elavsky:
4.5 to one,
Alli Torban:
Just to quickly walk through, you could download a, an extension or something to your browser, like to Chrome, and it's like an eyedropper tool and you can I drop, you know, the find out the color of what your text is and theirs will give you some sort of hex code. Then you do the eyedropper of the background. It'll give you a hex code. Then you go to this to the website,
Frank Elavsky:
Contrast checker, they have a great little tool. It'll even tell you your success level for like text large text and non-text elements. That third one is for chart geometries and non-tech stuff, which data is, has, you know, falls into often. And then the other ones over texts, you want to hit AA standards. That's like, you know, the internationally recognized minimum stumbling
Alli Torban:
That it sounds kind of complicated at first when it's
Speaker 4:
Easy, it's it does. It sounds like contrast ratios.
Alli Torban:
And I know that you you offer some consulting, like people like, oh my God, this is too much work, but I have money and I want to do it. So when I hire somebody and you offer a consulting right.
Frank Elavsky:
To do this, right? Yeah. So there's actually, you know, for, for those of you out there you're looking at your budget and you're thinking, wow, I can't afford this. Really making something accessible after the fact is expensive, but there are grants out there you can get, I don't know what they are. I occasionally, they, people will share them with me and I'll see them or whatever, but you can find outside funding to help initiatives depending on the sort of work you're doing. So if you work in open science, open source or academic, there may be some money you can, you can scrounge together. And I'd love to assist with projects like that. But also if you're a big company you know, or you have the money in the budget, yes. Please reach out if you're a big player, especially, you know not to name names, but there are some that I really think could have a huge influence in this face that I would love to work with. Yeah. We we've had, you know, great collaborations with people in the past. You can, you know, visit charitability or fizz studio eventually we'll kind of have a list of our collaborators up there. So you can Pru's if you want, but yeah, please get in touch. We do auditing. We help you remediate issues as well. And we also help, you know, train. So if you just want to build your skills up internally, you want to have office hours, just someone on retainer to ask questions to we do all that.
Alli Torban:
Yeah. That sounds amazing. Yeah. This is important. And I really appreciate you coming, coming on and kind of giving us a, a quick, a quick overview of it. And I will definitely link everything in the show notes that we talked about. Is there anything else that you'd like to add or think that I missed?
Frank Elavsky:
Yeah. There's just one thing I want to say. And I always love to say accessibility. It can be difficult when you first try and do this work. And so I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I just want to set expectations is going to be hard. Like data is, is hard already and making it accessible is going to be tough. And there will be times you may have to compromise your way of thinking about database, best practices, but this work is hugely rewarding. And it it's a space for innovation. Like I truly believe database practitioners. There's no way we just get into this because it's, it's like an easy run of the mill thing with everything already figured out everybody who does data is knows that there are it's, it's kind of the wild west. We're still doing a lot. DIY it's really exciting. You're always making something new and accessibility is that also it's this like space of innovation with serious need. There are human rights issues at stake here. I just, I just want to inspire people. It's it's really good work to do. I hope really that more and more people start doing it. Yeah.
Alli Torban:
I mean the most creative solutions come out of constraints, right? Yes,
Frank Elavsky:
That's right. That is absolutely right. That's a
Alli Torban:
Creative constraint. Nice. Well, thanks so much, Frank. Thank you, Alli.
Alli Torban:
Thanks so much to Frank for giving us so much great information to get started with integrating accessibility into our data as workflow. My final takeaway is that accessibility it's important and it's a skill just like anything else. And to develop that skill you have to practice. And the first thing you can do is become aware of the best practices around accessibility and data is, and Frank's made it easy for us. If you go to the show notes, click on the link to the charitability audit worksheet, download it. It's just a word doc. And just skim through the items that we're looking for when we're creating a vis. And that's the first step to integrating it into your workflow. For example, I just started a new project and I was picking out my color palette. And I knew from reading his audit that color contrast is very important.
Alli Torban:
So I went ahead and tested my color palette. First thing before I started using it, to make sure they provided enough contrast with the background. And that saved me a lot of effort, tweaking the colors after the fact, or, you know, putting it out just as I had it. And then having people have trouble reading it, become aware of the important things. And then come back to the checklist frequently to remind yourself and check over it again. And then it'll just become, you know, just part of your workflow to just be completely integrated. And you won't even have to be checking the list as often. And no one is perfect and this is a huge part of Frank's life and he knows it's hard. So don't feel like you have too to learn. So there's no reason to start. You can start download this checklist and read it. We can all do that. Thanks for joining me today. You can find the show notes at Davis today.com/shownotes/ 63. That's 603. Thanks to Heidi Horsley for my amazing cover art I'm Alli Torban. And remember you are what you constantly think about. So join me in thinking a lot about awesome database and subscribe to the show. So you never miss an episode. Bye now,
