Estimated reading time: 1 minute

Summary

Visualising accessibly employs a combination of several different communication principles: basic accessibility, clarity, transparency and storytelling

Creating accessible visualisations should be understood as a combination of several different communication principles. The primary one is basic accessibility, but to this we might add additional principles, such as clarity and transparency, the hobbyhorses of scientific communication. Another concept of significance is narrative, or storytelling, that is, the ability of a single image or collection of images to tell a story and not just describe objects.

In fact, one might argue that data visualisation is, in itself, accessibility. Let's take "Anscombe's quartet", which we explored in detail in the first module of this course, as an example. Exploring and understanding the patterns in those four data sets by only looking at the tables, calculating and comparing numbers is not very straightforward; it requires both time and mental effort. When the same data is instead visually encoded and visualised through graphs, however, the patterns hidden in the data instantly becomes much easier to grasp.

Taken together, the principles that we will go through in this module will ideally facilitate the creation of accessible and understandable visualisations. Our goal is to help you understand what principles make a graphic translation of research data clear and transparent while nonetheless maintaining credibility.