[strictnein]

I'm the defacto accessibility guy at work, and I'm trying to think of a good way to present this type of data in an accessible way, but I'm having trouble. When the gauges are fixed, it would be pretty straight forward, but as the gauges change, I'm not sure of a good way to present that, especially when the gauges are moving quickly.

[andrewstuart2]

A. Allow the refresh rate of your gauges to be set, or disabled entirely and only refreshed manually, perhaps with a button (so your user's screen reader can finish at its own pace).

B. Use SVG, and something like D3 to build your graphs with a textual representation. I have no idea if ARIA works in SVG, but I know there are plenty of ways to label your data textually, even without aria-label, etc.

Unfortunately, there's probably no good way to convey information in the same way that visualization does for sighted users (being able to intuit trends from lines, for example), but even just having access to the aggregate numbers in a time series is better than nothing.

[ctoth]

I would probably use an invisible aria-live region coupled with some logic to not spew messages to it too frequently or a minimum change to actually autoread. Could also do something like providing checkboxes only visible to the screen reader to subscribe/unsubscribe from gauge updates. I wonder if any actual web access experts could chime in?

[ctoth]

This is the actual underlying problem, and don't think I'm not aware of it. Everything is inaccessible by default, and takes special code and knowledge to make it accessible, specialized knowledge that a majority of devs don't have. Heck, I'm swimming in this every day and I wouldn't consider myself an expert/not sure if my idea for making this particular component accessible would even be the right way (tm) though I'm pretty certain it would at least work.

Probably the long term answer is to just cure blindness. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[daxelrod]

> Everything is inaccessible by default

In the early days of the web, when web pages were mostly text, and people weren't using tables for layout, things were a heck of a lot more accessible by default than they are now.

[bluetwo]

It might be as simple as adding the important info in an alt or title attribute that gets updated when the visual does.

[oconnore]

When the "guage" is selected, you could play a series of audio ticks faster or slower as the measure changes?