Accessible Data Visualization

The practice of designing data visualizations such as charts, graphs, and plots so that they can be perceived, understood, and interacted with by people with disabilities, including those who are blind or have low vision. Approaches include providing alternative text descriptions, structured data tables, sonification (representing data through sound), haptic feedback, and multimodal interactive systems that enable non-visual exploration of visual data. Accessible data visualization goes beyond simply adding alt text to chart images—it aims to provide equivalent access to the insights, trends, and patterns that sighted users can extract at a glance.