Accessibility in d3 Bar Charts

Note: this blog is an archive and not actively maintained. Some information may be out of date. If you'd like to see what I am working on or work with me in a consulting capacity, visit my website lindseykopacz.com.

Hey y’all! First off, I want to thank people for their patience with this post. I had a very stressful few weeks after I published my last post. Of course, I chose to do a highly technical post in the middle of a stressful deadline at work. That deadline has since past, and I finally finished this post!

I asked on Twitter what you’d like for me to write about next. Many people requested they wanted me to talk about accessibility for data visualizations. Because there’s so much that I have learned about data visualizations, I decided to make this a series.

For the first part of my series, I am going to talk to you about Accessible Bar Charts!

Starting out

I am going to be using the d3 JavaScript library because of my familiarity with it. I am building an inline SVG, and the principles we go over apply to SVG. The great thing about SVG is that if you know what you’re doing, it’s pretty simple to make accessible bar charts. However, there is that, knowing what you’re doing!

Below is the following data set I’m using:

const data = [
  {
    name: 'Banana Production',
    value: 20223290811,
  },
  {
    name: 'Apple Production',
    value: 8191091088.532,
  },
  {
    name: 'Clementine Production',
    value: 1162341399.19,
  },
]

The problem that I see with most bar charts is the absence of text elements indicating what the data is. They only have visual bars with the axis indicating it’s value.

So what is the problem with this? We have some text for the labels of the bars and the axis. However, the screen reader won’t reflect the value associated with the dataset.

When using the VoiceOver commands, it only reads the labels and then the axis ticks. What I want to read is the label and then the data value.

What we’d want is to have <text> elements that are next to the <rect> elements that have visual meaning. The best thing to do for screen readers is to ensure there is readable content. Inline SVGs are great for accessibility because images become markup. It’s fabulous. However, if your bar chart only communicates data with shapes, screen readers won’t read it by default.

Potential Solution #1

The first solution to make my bar chart accessible is adding a text element after I called the xAxis.

d3.selectAll('.tick')
  .append('text')
  .text((d, i) =>
    d3
      .format('.2s')(data[i].value)
      .replace('G', 'B')
  )

The .tick class is what comes by default with d3-axis, and it attaches to the <g> element that it comes with. I selected all the .tick elements and appended a formatted text element to it.

While this works for screen readers, I don’t think this is the most accessible data visualization experience for everyone. The vast range of the yAxis might make it challenging to understand the value to visual users. Because the y-axis goes to over 16 billion, it may be safe to assume that it may not be evident to our users what the value of the data is. It might be different if the y-axis range was 0 - 10.

Having <text> element is a better experience for screen reader users, but we could improve it for sighted users.

Potential Solution #2

Another solution would be to include a legend. It’s important to note that having a color-coded bar chart may not be the most accessible for colorblindness. If we go this route, we have to ensure a drastic and accessible contrast between each bar.

I made a few changes here:

+ const barColors = ['#000', '#d35f5f', '#fff'];
  barGroups
    .selectAll('rect')
    .data(data)
    .enter()
    .append('rect')
-   .attr("fill", "#d35f5f")
+   .attr('fill', (d, i) => barColors[i])
+   .attr('stroke', '#000')
    .attr('class', 'bar')
    .attr('x', d => xScale(d.name))
    .attr('y', d => yScale(d.value))
    .attr('width', xScale.bandwidth())
    .attr('height', d => height - yScale(d.value));

I added the barColors variable as an array full of hex colors. I used an anonymous function to choose the fill color. I also added a stroke color because we need that to show the white bar!

I also made the SVG wider and added some legend width. Otherwise, the legend would be cut off!

const margin = { top: 20, right: 20, bottom: 70, left: 90 };
const width = 600 - margin.left - margin.right;
const height = 300 - margin.top - margin.bottom;
+ const legendWidth = 300;

const svg = d3
  .select("#chart")
- .attr("width", width + margin.left + margin.right)
+ .attr("width", width + margin.left + margin.right + legendWidth)
  .attr("height", height + margin.top + margin.bottom);

We aren’t done yet though! We still need to add the legend! Something I learned here through error is that we have to refactor this code a bit. I am a bit of a d3 newbie. Many times it’s me aimlessly trying things and realizing I need to take a bit of a different approach. What I need to do here is refactor it this way:

+ const g = barGroups
+   .selectAll('g')
+   .data(data)
+   .enter()
+   .append('g')

- barGroups
-   .selectAll("rect")
-   .data(data)
-   .enter()
-   .append("rect")
+ g.append('rect')
  .attr('fill', (d, i) => barColors[i])
  .attr('stroke', '#000')
  .attr('class', 'bar')
  .attr('x', d => xScale(d.name))
  .attr('y', d => yScale(d.value))
  .attr('width', xScale.bandwidth())
  .attr('height', d => height - yScale(d.value))

We need to have multiple <rect> elements bound to the same data. I decided to bind the data to the <g> instead and append whatever elements I needed to that. I wanted to use the same data binding for the legend, so I went with that!

So I started adding some new <rect> and <text> tags to make the legend!

const lineItemHeight = 30
g.append('rect')
  .attr('fill', (d, i) => barColors[i])
  .attr('stroke', '#000')
  .attr('width', 20)
  .attr('height', 20)
  .attr('x', width + margin.right)
  .attr('y', (d, i) => lineItemHeight * (i + 1))

g.append('text')
  .text(d => `${d.name} - ${d.value}`)
  .attr('x', width + margin.right + 30)
  .attr('y', (d, i) => lineItemHeight * (i + 1) + 15)

Now we have some text that reflects the actual data and the label. One of the last things we want to do is format the numbers so that it reads nicely.

g.append('text')
- .text(d => `${d.name} - ${d.value}`)
+ .text(d => `${d.name} - ${d3.format(".2s")(d.value).replace("G", "B")}`)

Now let’s add a title to the legend and say that B = billions.

const svg = d3
  .select("#chart")
  .attr("width", width + margin.left + margin.right + legendWidth)
  .attr("height", height + margin.top + margin.bottom)
  .attr('aria-labelledby', 'title');

+ svg.append('text')
+  .text('Legend')
+  .attr('x', width + margin.right + margin.left)
+  .attr('y', 20)

+ svg.append('text')
+  .text('B = billion')
+  .attr('x',width + margin.right + margin.left)
+  .attr('y', 40)

We want to adjust the positioning of the legend items because the Legend title and the key took up some space.

g.append('rect')
  .attr("fill", (d, i) => barColors[i])
  .attr("stroke", "#000")
  .attr('width', 20)
  .attr('height', 20)
  .attr('x', width + margin.right)
- .attr('y', (d, i) => lineItemHeight * (i + 1))
+ .attr('y', (d, i) => lineItemHeight * (i + 1) + 30)

g.append('text')
  .text(d => `${d.name} - ${d3.format(".2s")(d.value).replace("G", "B")}`)
  .attr('x', width + margin.right + 30)
- .attr('y', (d, i) => lineItemHeight * (i + 1) + 15)
+ .attr('y', (d, i) => lineItemHeight * (i + 1) + 45)

Here is the final result!

Adding more context

I used Heather Migliorisi’s graph CodePen as inspiration for this post. As it is now, screen readers have a text version of our visualizations. However, I noticed her fantastic use of ARIA to add more context to her graph. I’m going to take some of the same principles she did and apply them to this graph with d3 (she wrote her’s in straight SVG).

The first thing I am going to do is add a title to my SVG.

const svg = d3
  .select("#chart")
  .attr("width", width + margin.left + margin.right + legendWidth)
  .attr("height", height + margin.top + margin.bottom)
+ .attr('aria-labelledby', 'bar-chart-title');

+ svg.append('text')
+  .text('2018 Fruit Production')
+  .attr('id', 'bar-chart-title')
+  .attr("x", margin.left)
+  .attr("y", 250)

I recommend going through her piece on Accessible SVGs to learn why this is good practice. She went through plentiful research and knows more about SVG than I do!

I liked how she made the bar graph read out like a list. I am going to add those to each of them as well! I’m also going to add an aria-label to the group with the list role.

const barGroups = svg
  .append("g")
+ .attr('role', 'list')
+ .attr('aria-label', 'bar chart')
  .attr("class", "data")
  .attr("transform", `translate(${margin.left}, 0)`);

const barColors = ["#000", "#d35f5f", "#fff"];

const g = barGroups
  .selectAll('g')
  .data(data)
  .enter()
  .append('g')
+ .attr('role', 'listitem');

Something that Heather does that I am not going to do here is adding role="presentation" to the axes. The reason for that is that I posted this question on Twitter and got mixed responses.

I had thought about the redundancy of screen readers, but someone else brought up an excellent point.

This is something I hadn’t thought about, even as someone with ADHD myself. So with that said, I’ve decided to put the axes later in the DOM and added an aria-label to those groups in the SVG.

svg
  .append("g")
  .attr("class", "x-axis")
+ .attr('aria-label', 'x axis')
  .attr("transform", `translate(${margin.left}, ${height})`)
  .call(xAxis);

svg
  .append("g")
  .attr("class", "y-axis")
+ .attr('aria-label', 'y axis')
  .attr("transform", `translate(${margin.left}, 0)`)
  .call(yAxis);

Conclusion

I’m sure I could improve this visualization a lot! I am still relatively new to SVG, and some of this is subjective. It’s unclear if the axis points would be redundant. I got mixed answers about whether I should hide it from a screen reader or not. I decided to go with more context is better, unless it’s annoying.

If you liked this blog post and are interested in learning more about accessibility, take my 10 days of a11y free email course.

Cheers! Have a great week!

About Lindsey

Lindsey is an accessibility expert, JavaScript lover, and Front End Developer who's passionate about inclusivity both inside and outside the web. Read more about her on the About Page