Taxonomy development: graphics in science and mathematics disciplines

This is the first step toward responding to the action item that I took at the meeting on Friday. By way of disclaimer, my educational background is not in the sciences or mathematics, but I am consulting specialists for purposes of identifying graphics that would be most amenable to an interactive presentation and which are not well served by the provision of textual alternatives.

I think node/edge graphs are an important category in these disciplines. We’ve already proposed to address them in subsequent work. In particular, implementation of the SVG connector draft (or a representation with similar semantics) would significantly aid the accessibility of this class of diagram. Flow charts, state diagrams, network diagrams, trees etc., e.g., in computer science and programming, can be quite complex, and as discussed at the meeting, further work on navigational conventions is needed.

Graphs in a rectangular coordinate plane are likewise important and ubiquitous, as may be recalled from secondary school analytic geometry and calculus. I suspect these graphs could be described by concepts in the taxonomy that should be included in any case to capture data visualization. Whether a graph represents data or a mathematical function doesn’t make any difference, in principle, to its content. Thus I think this important class of graphics can be easily addressed within the scope of work already proposed. There are however special cases, for example, a graph in which a certain area under the curve is shaded to indicate the integral that a student is expected to calculate (perhaps analyzable as the combination of an interval and a graph/path in the plane).

Many closed figures, configurations of lines, etc., occur in geometry. Perhaps it would be best to rely on a combination of the implicit semantics of SVG (to the extent that these can be queried by assistive technologies) and author-supplied labels and descriptions to handle these cases. Some common shapes could be incorporated into the taxonomy if necessary, but a more general approach would clearly have advantages.

There are further categories of graphics that I plan to characterize (they are also germane to my current accessibility research). You should expect a substantive post on that subject in due course.


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Received on Monday, 23 March 2015 19:10:21 UTC