Code for Science & Society TidyTuesday Data Viz Accessibility event
The MiR Community seeks to promote the visibility and leadership of R users from marginalized races, genders, and the disabled community through community-led efforts that support professional development. This week-long TidyTuesday event hosted by the MiR Community aims to enhance the accessibility of shared visualizations for a wider audience, and increase awareness among data visualization creators of the benefits of these practices using modern tools available within the R programming ecosystem. The event will teach and promote a variety of accessibility practices that can be implemented in the design, creation, and sharing of data visualizations so that data-driven insights can be communicated as inclusively and effectively as possible.
Financially supported by a $10,000 grant from the Code for Science & Society virtual event fund
Twitter announcement: https://twitter.com/miR_community/status/1438214181287759873?s=20
Communication: GitHub, Discord, and email if necessary (no Slack)
- Silvia Canelón -- event co-lead
- Liz Hare -- event co-lead
- Danielle Smalls-Perkins -- event co-lead
- Batool Almarzouq
- Sara Stoudt
- Educators 3-10
- Greg Wilson -- teaching expertise
- Andreas Stefik -- teaching and accessibility expertise
- Tom Mock -- manager of the TidyTuesday project
- Frank Elavsky -- data experience and accessibility specialist
- Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel -- teaching expertise
- Emily Kubicek -- visual perception and learning expertise
- Julia Stewart Lowndes -- teaching expertise
- We saw a tweet from data viz consultant Rebeca Pop about how to make charts more accessible and thought it would be nice to build these tips and others into the weekly R TidyTuesday data visualization social project. As examples, tips from Rebeca included:
- Use white space wisely
- Label data directly
- Use alternative text
- The idea was proposed on Twitter to Tom Mock, who manages TidyTuesday, and he expressed a desire to collaborate on it with the MiR Community.
- Most TidyTuesday visualizations are not accessible to many members of the R community
- R users that participate in TidyTuesday would benefit in learning about the why and how to create accessible data visualizations
- Education could be provided to TidyTuesday participants in the form of bite-sized accessibility tips/guidelines
- Encouraging TidyTuesday participants to practice implementing accessibility practices in their data viz could be a way to both help more people access them and help the data viz creators feel more confident in using these skills in future TidyTuesdays as well as in other places
- The MiR Community accessibility committee (Dorris Scott, Danielle Smalls-Perkins, and Liz Hare) had already begun working on accessibility guidelines for the R community in other contexts
- The MiR Community will host one TidyTuesday week in 2022 with a specific accessibility focus
- The goal will be to teach participants how to implement a few accessibility practices (to be determined) in their data viz that week
- Participants will be encouraged to tweet out which practice(s) they implemented along with their data viz and hopefully cause a little ripple effect of accessibility education. MiR project organizers could potentially help by retweeting some examples
- MiR will provide educational materials which could include a short video made available on YouTube as well as a blog post. Everything formatted to be accessible, of course.
- This project will continue to be carried out by MiR with ongoing and evolving education and conversations about accessibility in the R community. The idea is to keep the conversation going beyond TidyTuesday and beyond data viz.