Posted on October 22, 2026
On Alt-Texts and Elaborate Graphs
At first glance, accessibility and data visualization are not the most natural pairing. Both vaguely have to do with web development, but broadly they seem like disparate topics. But our readings and discussions this week for Clio Wired have me thinking about the deeper connections between the two.
For one, both are ways of shifting the medium of information in order to help a given audience understand it better. Web accessibility standards like alt text, aria labels, and transcriptions for audio and video, are all ways of helping those with disabilities understand a medium that may not be originally accessible to them. Similarly, data visualization takes complex statistics and datasets – something an audience may not have the time to peruse or the statistical literacy to understand – and turns it into something that naturally informs intuitive understandings.
On a related level, they both speak to the way in which we make considerations for our audiences when we create digital materials for the public. In class, we explored a number of data visualizations, and what made them effective at presenting their arguments – from clean, well-structured and interactive data with a clear purpose which highlighted interesting facets of the data, to an example which attempted to visualize Super Bowl wins but did so in a manner that quickly became impossible to parse at scale.
Accessibility and visualizations are also both representative of the wide range of possibilities afforded to us by digital techniques. While large print, Braille, and audio books certainly existed in the past, they were limited to a smaller class of books than those in print. Now, any digital text is accessible to those with difficulty seeing through screen readers. And while some of the examples we looked at in class like Charles Joseph Minard’s visualization of Napolean’s retreat from Moscow or John Snow’s epidemiological breakthrough map showing the source of a cholera outbreak predate the internet, digital tools have been a force multiplier for data visualization, making precise, easily accessible and interactive visualizations possible.
However, they both also represent an area where we as historians and academics must do better to put in work to achieve better results. As demonstrated by our accessibility scan of Mason’s website, many academic resources online are missing basic accommodations like alt-text. I was annoyed and disappointed in myself to realize that there were images on my own site which I had failed to add alt-text to. It’s certainly more work to stop and mark every image, but it’s an important part of making sure history and the internet is usable by all. At the same time, data visualization (and innovations on digital history more generally) is widely a niche skill. As demonstrated by Mitchell Whitelaw’s paper on developing more “generous” interfaces for digital cultural collections, the humanities represent a unique opportunity to be more thoughtful on how we put material on the internet. We can develop new ways of displaying and conveying information outside of what is easy or natural.1Mitchell Whitelaw, “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections, ” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9, no. 1 (2015).
As we progress through our learnings as digital historians, with the learning, developing, and applying of digital methods to history which that entails, we must be cognizant to make full use of our medium to ensure we are always looking for new methods of understanding for readers of all abilities.