The A11Y Project update: July 16th, 2021

What’s new

New post! Quick Tip: Everyday Accessibility, by Michele A. Williams, PhD.

Accessibility Frontiers

In this short section, Sam, Accessibility Evangelist at Fable, and full-time screen reader user, will share something interesting that’s happening at the frontier of accessibility.

Data Sonification

One of the most interesting problems in the field of accessibility is how to give everyone equal access to data, no matter what sense they might be using. Listening to a screen reader read out a table of numbers doesn’t give a blind person the same insights into trends and crossover points that glancing at a graph would for someone with vision.

This leads to the idea of data sonification: turning visual graphs into sound, to make the experience of a graph similar for blind and sighted people alike. Research into image sonification has been going on for years, though it has yet to become mainstream; it is likely that cheap and affordable smart glasses will soon accelerate adoption. As well, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has increased awareness of how critical it can be that everyone can access and understand graphs, with SAS doing important work to bring this technology out of the research lab, and onto the regular web.

Understanding visual data is important in everything from research to mathematics education. As a screen reader user myself, I can’t wait until this technology is the norm, and is built-into browsers and screen readers, meaning I can quickly understand any type of graph, without reading a long list of numbers or an awkward text description. Apple is the first to build data sonification into a screen reader, and I hope that others will soon follow.