[rikroots]

> Making charts (of any kind) accessible is a really hard endeavour.

Agreed! I've done a lot of experimenting with my canvas library to try and make accessibility a "first class citizen" in graphical representations, including charts. Things (I think) I've got right is to make it easier for people to use keyboard navigation to interrogate a chart, and making sure that graphical text gets properly copied into the DOM in an ordered way, and updates when the graphical text changes.

The main failure I face is getting screen readers to recognise that the graphical text exists/updates. For example, this chart demo[1] is responsive, interactive and keyboard accessible but, when listening to that page with VoiceOver on a Mac, there's a clear failure to get the current data point from the screen to the listener.

I know screen reader tech is the wildest of Wild Wests when it comes to front end. My only hope is that there's an easy solution to the issue, like I've badly misunderstood how screen readers work and the solution will be obvious when I stumble across the key errors I'm making ... and correct them!

[1] London crime charts - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/demo/modules-001.html