Accessible data visualisation – beyond colour blindness

It’s pretty low-hanging fruit to ensure your data visualisation uses colourblind-friendly colours – most colour pickers will give you a colourblind-safe palette. But moving beyond that isn’t just a matter of laziness, argues data viz guy Frank Elavsky over on Twitter: there’s also systemic racism and sexism creeping in.

“~4.5% of people with northern European ancestry are colorblind,” writes Elavsky. “But less than half of a percent of women are. This means that nearly 8% of men from a northern European background have some form of colorblindness.”

“Why do we have far more resources for dealing with colorblindness (<4% global rate) than low vision, which affects just over 30% of people?” he asks, and then posits that the origins could be white, male-dominated academia.

The thread also includes a great list of things data visualisers can do to make their work more accessible, from high contrast for the visually impaired, to better keyboard support for those with motor challenges.