Accessibility often focuses on the design of the web, technologies, tools, and physical spaces to improve access for all. Data accessibility borrows this framing with the goal of making data available for all users to be able to access, interpret, and use in decision-making.

Data accessibility can include the use of tools such as color contrast checkers, alternative text, and headings to make communication as accessible as possible. We expand this definition to also include sharing a summary of data — for example, a pivot table or key highlights — instead of a full spreadsheet that requires time to interpret. Despite proficiency with data or visualization tools, limited time and capacity can still make data inaccessible to many users. Selecting and presenting data effectively for your audience can be as much an accessibility measure as considering color vision deficiency in a chart.

This interactive, half-day workshop will teach you how to work with data in a way that centers accessibility to ensure that data, reports, and visualizations are inclusive for as many people as possible and to make decisions that center accessibility from multiple perspectives throughout your assessment, data work, and communication.

By helping participants recognize data structures and teaching them to clean and manipulate data, this workshop will familiarize participants with the tools and methods necessary to effectively communicate quantitative data and to identify and address common data quality issues. These skills help design data outputs in a format that can be aggregated, which is critical in communicating data efficiently and accessibly (though it is not without its caveats). We will also delve into best practices for accessible data visualizations and provide concrete takeaways for creating accessible visualizations in widely used tools such as Tableau and Power BI.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Identify and manipulate the underlying structure of spreadsheet data.
• Use essential Excel functions to clean and manage common data quality issues.
• Create data visualizations following accessibility best practices in the context of widely used data visualization tools such as Tableau and Power BI.
• Identify tools to help with accessible design.

Facilitators

Negeen Aghassibake (she/her), Data Visualization Librarian, University of Washington Libraries

Maggie Faber (she/her), Assessment & Data Visualization Librarian, University of Washington Libraries