Re: Taxonomy development: graphics in science and mathematics disciplines

23.03.2015, 20:10, "White, Jason J" <jjwhite@ets.org>:

> I think node/edge graphs are an important category in these disciplines. We’ve already proposed to address them in subsequent work. In particular, implementation of the SVG connector draft (or a representation with similar semantics) would significantly aid the accessibility of this class of diagram. Flow charts, state diagrams, network diagrams, trees etc., e.g., in computer science and programming, can be quite complex, and as discussed at the meeting, further work on navigational conventions is needed.

Agreed.

If people want to play with some examples, I have taken some things from the real world and some sanitised stuff and put it on the wiki at https://www.w3.org/wiki/SVG_Accessibility/Directed_Graphs with links to github where you can get teh SVG sources and play to your heart's content.

Not that for the W3C process images in particular I am very interested in practical suggestions for improvement, as these are published in a document I edit and would like to make clearer.

One thing that occurs to me is that colour could be used to identify phases - and perhaps available transitions, as someone navigated the document.

> Graphs in a rectangular coordinate plane are likewise important and ubiquitous, as may be recalled from secondary school analytic geometry and calculus.

Also in very basic science, learning to record things in bar charts is essentially done on a rectangular grid.

> I suspect these graphs could be described by concepts in the taxonomy that should be included in any case to capture data visualization. Whether a graph represents data or a mathematical function doesn’t make any difference, in principle, to its content.

I don't think that is true, and I think the key differentiator is that mathematical functions, especially as presented in school, tend to be continuous, while data graphs are often not. The difference between a sine wave and a scatter plot seems important to me, albeit at a very initial stage of thinking about the problem.

> Thus I think this important class of graphics can be easily addressed within the scope of work already proposed. There are however special cases, for example, a graph in which a certain area under the curve is shaded to indicate the integral that a student is expected to calculate (perhaps analyzable as the combination of an interval and a graph/path in the plane).
>
> Many closed figures, configurations of lines, etc., occur in geometry. Perhaps it would be best to rely on a combination of the implicit semantics of SVG (to the extent that these can be queried by assistive technologies) and author-supplied labels and descriptions to handle these cases. Some common shapes could be incorporated into the taxonomy if necessary, but a more general approach would clearly have advantages.

Actually, taking these two things together, I think there are interesting things SVG can do with bounding boxes and shapes, to describe areas and help people understand things like calculus - or the magic of π and how it lets us work out the area of a circle.

And I agree that where we already have taxonomies, such as rectangles, or text, or arcs, within SVG source, it is useful to leverage them as far as possible.

> There are further categories of graphics that I plan to characterize (they are also germane to my current accessibility research). You should expect a substantive post on that subject in due course.

I look forward to it.

What is the preferred issue tracker where we can start to collet some of these questions for everyone to consider?

cheers

Chaals

--
Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
chaals@yandex-team.ru - - - Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Friday, 15 May 2015 16:17:17 UTC