Teaching Visual Accessibility in the Data Science Classes: Why, What, When, and How

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# Teaching Visual Accessibility in the Data Science Classes: Why, What, When, and How
## JooYoung Seo and Mine Dogucu
### Symposium on Data Science and Statistics [bit.ly/sdss-2022](https://bit.ly/sdss-2022)
### streamed on: 2022-06-08, recorded on: 2022-05-25
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---

## Statistics

- 61 million adults in the United States live with a disability

- 26 percent (one in 4) of adults in the United States have some type of disability.

- 4.6 percent of people with a disability have a vision disability with blindness or serious difficulty seeing even when wearing glasses.

[CDC Infographic on disability](https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/infographic-disability-impacts-all.html)

---

## ADA

Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life.

**Ableism** is discrimination in favor of able-bodied people.

---

[Computing Competencies for Undergraduate Data Science Curricula](https://dstf.acm.org/DSReportDraft2Full.pdf) by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Data Science Task Force

Draft 2 was published in **December 2019**

Analysis and Presentation, Foundational considerations, Knowledge

**Accessibility considerations for different groupings of users including those with special needs**

---

## Accessibility as Career Preparation

[Accessible Technology Skills Gap Report  by The Partnership on Employment & Accessible Technology (PEAT), 2018](https://www.peatworks.org/infographic-the-accessible-technology-skills-gap/)

84% of industry respondents say it is important or very important to their company to hire developers and designers with accessible technology skills.

60% said it was difficult or very difficult for their organization to find job candidates with accessibility skills. 0% said it was easy or very easy.

41% of companies consider accessibility certification credentials as a differentiator in hiring.

---

## Curriculum Goal

As educators, we have to ensure that the current and the next generation of data scientists, provide public-facing outputs (websites, analysis reports, etc.) that are accessible.

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## Learning Objectives

- Student should get familiar with American Disabilities Act. 
- Students should use at least one assistive technology (i.e. screen reader).
- Students should consider different representations of data.

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## Assistive Technology

- Assistive Technology is any form of technology (software, device) that helps people with disabilities perform certain activities. Examples:

- walking sticks
- wheel chairs
- screen readers

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## Screen reader

A screen reader is an assistive technology that supports blind or visually impaired people in using their computer.

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Students can use screen reader on Windows and Mac

- If you are on a Windows machine go to Settings > Ease of Access > Narrator,and then turn on the toggle under Use Narrator.

- If you are on a Mac go to System Preferences > Accessibility > Voice Over > Enable Voice Over

---

## Data Visualization - Colors

---

### Color Blindness Simulator

```r
colorblindr::cvd_grid(fig)
```

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[Color blindness simulation](https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/): red-blind/protanopia

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[Color blindness simulation](https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/): green-blind/deuteranopia

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[Color blindness simulation](https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/): blue-blind/tritanopia

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### Okabe-Ito Color Palette

```r
palette.colors(palette = "Okabe-Ito")
```

```
##         black        orange       skyblue   bluishgreen        yellow 
##     "#000000"     "#E69F00"     "#56B4E9"     "#009E73"     "#F0E442" 
##          blue    vermillion reddishpurple          gray 
##     "#0072B2"     "#D55E00"     "#CC79A7"     "#999999"
```

---

```r
fig + colorblindr::scale_color_OkabeIto()
```

---

### Resources

[Color Blindness Simulator](https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/) You can upload any image and in return get an image with colors that would be visible to color-blind people with specific color vision deficiency.

[Okabe-Ito 2008](https://jfly.uni-koeln.de/color/)  Color Universal Design. Color palette that is color-blind friendly.

[Okabe-Ito color-palette](https://mikemol.github.io/technique/colorblind/2018/02/11/color-safe-palette.html) Color codes for Okabe-Ito palette.

---

## Data Verbalization

### Alternate Text

- "Alt text" describes contents of an image. 
- It is used in HTML pages. 
- Screen-readers cannot read images but can read alt text. 
- Alt text has to be provided. 
- We can verbalize data via alternate text.

---

### Manual Alternate Text

- Chart type

- Type of data

- Reason for including the chart

- Link to data or source (not in alt text but in main text)

[Amy Cesal](https://medium.com/nightingale/writing-alt-text-for-data-visualization-2a218ef43f81)

---

### Data Verbalization -  Automated

The automated alternate text for this plot is on the next slide.

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### Data Verbalization -  Automated

```r
BrailleR::VI(example_barplot)
```

```
## This is an untitled chart with no subtitle or caption.
## It has x-axis 'transmission' with labels automatic and manual.
## It has y-axis 'count' with labels 0, 5, 10 and 15.
## The chart is a bar chart with 2 vertical bars.
## Bar 1 is centered horizontally at automatic, and spans vertically from 0 to 19.
## Bar 2 is centered horizontally at manual, and spans vertically from 0 to 13.
```

<hr>

Drawback of using `VI()` is that not every type of plot can be verbalized yet.

---

### Alternate Texts are Under Utilized in the Data Science Community

"Over the 3 years of TidyTuesday, there were 7,136 data viz tweets and only 215 (3%) of them had alt-text"

[Canelón & Hare, 2021 ](https://github.com/spcanelon/csvConf2021)

---

## Data Sonification

Data sonification is the presentation of data as sound.

Examples:

[SAS Graphics Accelerator Examples](https://support.sas.com/software/products/graphics-accelerator/samples/index.html)

[SAS Graphics Accelerator Chrome Extension](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sas-graphics-accelerator/ockmipfaiiahknplinepcaogdillgoko?hl=en)

R example:

```r
sonify::sonify(1:10)
```

---

## Data Tactualization

Data tactulization refers to making data visualization in a form so that it can be touchable by fingers.

[tactileR](https://github.com/jooyoungseo/tactileR) package in R

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---

## When?

at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

- IS 407 - Introduction to Data Science

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at University of California Irvine

- Stats 5 - Seminar in Data Science

- ICS 80 - Introduction to Data Science

- Stats 295 - Scientific Computing with R
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## Important Take-Aways

-  Relevant to undergraduate and graduate curriculum

- Can be taught in language-specific and language-agnostic courses

- Students should be assessed on the practice of accessibility practices

- Students should be able to take away this knowledge from non-data specific courses.

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## Acknowledgment

Dogucu has been supported by the [Teach Access](https://teachaccess.org/) network.

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## Thank you

<hr>

JooYoung Seo

[jseo1005@illinois.edu](mailto:jseo1005@illinois.edu)

[seo_jooyoung](https://twitter.com/seo_jooyoung)

[jooyoungseo](https://github.com/jooyoungseo)

]

Mine Dogucu

[mdogucu@uci.edu](mailto:mdogucu@uci.edu)

[MineDogucu](https://twitter.com/MineDogucu)

[mdogucu](https://github.com/mdogucu)

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