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Comment by anonymfus | Hacker News Reader

That is a very creative hack, but please never use it, as it destroys accessibility: screen reader will read all these brackets and numbers.

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How about something like https://stackoverflow.com/a/54153662

  <span class="graph" aria-label="A graph showing the price of Bitcoin in USD for the past 8 hours" role="img">{11:30}§2b|2i|3t|3c|2o|0i|1n|0{06:30}[35551[34323]</span>

That describes the container, but doesn’t describe the content. A proper label would be something like “A graph showing the price of Bitcoin in USD for the past 8 hours. The price rises from x to y in the first 2 hours, then slowly decreases to z.”

Not an accessibility expert, but that sounds like an analysis of the data, which does not communicate the same as a chart itself. Fine for a blurb to go alongside it though.

But for hard graph data, I would expect "14:00 $123.456; 14:05 $999.999" etc.

No, I think I disagree. If the raw data told the story then there wouldn’t be a need for a chart for sighted users. The chart helps a sighted user get a feeling for the data, and the alt text needs to do the same.

Are there accessible ways of visualizing data?

well yes for people who have accessibility issues but are sighted, probably such things as color blindness needs to be taken into account, or dyslexia if there are text labels on part of the visualization.

For people that are not sighted the accessible way to present the data is probably a block of text their screen reader can read.

Yep. I block remote fonts by default and for a moment it all seemed very weird.

Why do you block fonts?

Bandwidth and privacy.

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