Comment by danShumway
6 years ago
> Docs and Sheets are basically fully accessible. in fact Sheets is the best spreadsheet program I've used.
This is off topic, and I don't want to distract from the current conversation, but speaking of sheets -- as a web developer, I often build SVG charts with d3, and I've been racking my brain lately trying to figure out how to make them more accessible to blind users beyond just linking to tables of data.
If you're using Sheets, are you also regularly consuming charts as well? Is there a common auditory shorthand for representing something like a pie chart?
Sadly no. Making charts accessible is an unsolved problem. There have been some efforts for accessible graphing calculators that work more or less, but it's not trivial to make a generic one-size-fits-all solution.
For Sheets, the underlying stuff that runs it is quite complicated. They ended up doing something akin to an offscreen model with HTML to make it work because afaik they use a canvas of some sort to draw everything. In fact, unless you turn on braille mode, both products actually have a built-in screen reader that talks via aria live regions. That's terrible practice, but to their credit they got ahead of what the internet was providing for accessibility and didn't have a choice in that regard.
For something you can practically implement without a huge project, I suggest text descriptions of the data. If you want to do a bit better, make it an HTML table--that'll give some convenient navigability for free.