Accessible Maps

How can we make interactive maps that are more accessible?

Far more to say here than can fit into one post. Maps are hard. Accessible maps are harder.

The “traditional” approach in general has been to treat them like complex images. This is a start. But that assumes that a map is like a chart, which it is, only in the most reductive of ways. A map is much more than a chart, and an interactive map, even more so.

There are a number of related, but quite different aspects to this. Here’s a general rollup:

• Color contrast, color blind safe colors (very hard, perhaps impossible for more than a few simultaneous colors)
• Keyboard navigation, accessibility and focus
• Map caption (ideally dynamic)
• Map description (definitely dynamic)

We have a few recent examples where we’ve tried to put all of this together. Here’s one: https://www.parksforcalifornia.org/communities/

I’ll try to break this down in more detail in future posts.