ARIA roles for charts (was: Master thesis on SVG accessibility)

Hi all!

I'm picking up the thread I started in September 2018 about a master's 
thesis on accessible SVG (see my initial post below).

First, thank you for all your replies!

I'm currently working hard on the practical part of my thesis. This 
shall be a web-based tool (and in the future maybe a browser extension) 
which parses charts with ARIA markup and presents them in a textual way 
with (hopefully intuitive and easy-to-use) keyboard navigation. The UI 
shall be usable both in combination with a screen reader and stand-alone 
with speech synthesis provided by the Web Speech API. The tool is based 
on Doug Schepers' "Describler" [2].

Now one essential question is which system of ARIA roles to assume for 
recognising charts and their child elements such as data series, axes, 
and data points. It seems to me that there are several approaches 
towards this but not yet any standard or at least any trend towards it. 
Here's what I found:

- the proposed system "ARIA Roles for Charts" - still only a Wiki since 
2015 [1]
- Doug Schepers' system of ARIA roles and properties used for Describler [2]
- Doug Schepers' new charting suite "fizz.studio" using the standard 
roles "graphics-document", "graphics-object", and "graphics-symbol", 
refining them with various values for "aria-roledescription" [3] (no 
official taxonomy or sample charts yet)
- a proposal by Léonie Watson to annotate chart elements with 
corresponding ARIA roles for tables, such as "table" for the chart, 
"row" for a data series, and "cell" for a data point [4]
- a system applied by Highcharts using role "region" for data series and 
role "img" for data points but no roles for axes, legends, or the chart 
itself [5]

Of course, it might be best if my tool could cope with all these 
different types of chart encoding formats one day, but now I'm wondering 
which one to start with. Do you have any suggestion?

What about the proposed system presented in the Wiki [1]? - Is it still 
meant to become a standard, or has it been dismissed in the meantime?

If you know a better place to ask this (maybe the public-aria list), 
please tell me!

Many thanks in advance for your help and your ideas!

Cheers,

Chris


[1] https://www.w3.org/wiki/SVG_Accessibility/ARIA_roles_for_charts
[2] http://describler.com
[3] https://fizz.studio/
[4] https://tink.uk/accessible-svg-line-graphs/
[5] https://www.highcharts.com/a11y.html


-------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht --------
Betreff: Master thesis on SVG accessibility
Datum: Wed, 26 Sep 2018 00:59:21 +0200
Von: Christopher-A. Kopel <kopel@student.tugraz.at>
An: public-svga11y@w3.org

Hi all!

I am student of Information and Computer Engineering at the Graz 
University of Technology (Austria) and intend to start my master thesis 
in October. As I am blind, I would be highly interested in writing about 
a topic in the field of web accessibility.

One of my professors, who mainly researches on data visualisation, had 
the idea that my thesis could deal with the accessibility of SVG, which 
seems very interesting to me, too. However, reading some publications 
about this topic (i.e., some of the recent W3C recommendations or 
recommendation proposals, respectively, as well as some texts and 
presentations by Doug Schepers and Léonie Watson), I got the impression 
that much good work has already been done on this. For this reason, I'd 
like to ask you for your opinions: Do you think that with a master 
thesis on the accessibility of SVG I could contribute to its 
improvement? If so, is there any work for me which you would regard as 
particularly valuable at the moment? It would be great if this could 
include any kind of implementation but I'm also fine with some analysis, 
testing, or evaluation. For example, I think of a tool (or maybe even 
better, a patch to a browser or screen reader) that transforms all 
usable information of an SVG document into a form that is 
well-comprehensible for a blind user, taking Doug Schepers' "Describler" 
as a starting point. Another idea of mine would be a patch to an SVG 
authoring tool or an SVG scripting library like 3d.js that improves the 
accessibility of the resulting SVG structures.

Thank you very much in advance for your feedback and any suggestions!

Cheers,

    Chris

-- 

  *** Message from: ***

Christopher-Alexander Kopel, BSc
E-Mail kopel@student.TUGraz.at

Received on Monday, 4 November 2019 16:42:38 UTC