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Comment by lIIllIIllIIllII | Hacker News Reader

the chart type is the font, and the data is literally the text you type, so the chart itself is alt text

this is like, maximally accessible

They show the input. I would not consider that to be usable for a human reader. Add in that you’re relying on visual cues to connect the numbers to the legend and it’s even less useful to the human reader.

Consider the simple case of a two-item pie chart which would be, say, 40+60</blue> followed by somewhere else lemurs and cows.

That doesn’t seem very accessible compared to an alt text on an image that reads “pie chart showing fraction of lemurs (40) and cows (60).”

What is the standard screen reader rendering of a line chart? (Now realizing I’ve made a lot of inaccessible charts in my life…oops.)

It will just give whatever is in the alt text for the image.

Yes, but what should be in the alt text for the image? Your pie chart example makes sense (“pie chart showing fraction of lemurs (40) and cows (60)”) because there are only two data points, but what should it say for a line chart showing the GDP yearly since 1900? A huge list of numbers? An overall interpretation of some sort?

It would be context dependent. For automatically-generated alt-text you’d likely see some human-understandable representation of the text which would likely be something like, “… 1919 GDP up to 4 million, 1920 GDP down to 3.9 million, …” On my own personal site when I’ve presented charts, I usually give an overall interpretation of the data, see, e.g., https://www.dahosek.com/2023-in-rejections-and-acceptances/ or https://www.dahosek.com/writerly-resolutions-november-status... (I just realized, looking at these pages that I need to do some fiddling with WP templates to get rid of the big ugly display of the featured image at the top of the page which doesn’t include any alt text at all). But the point is that just throwing unlabeled numbers at the user is not an acceptable presentation for accessibility.

(since I posted this, I’ve done some clean-up, although I also noticed that MarsEdit likes to put meaningless stuff into the “title” param of the img tag)

The data is not necessarily same as what you type because it has to be normalized first. And it will lack any labels.

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