Accessibility in official statistics

Data Visualisation
Accessibility
There are simple steps that analysts and data scientists can take to improve the accessibility of dashboards, interactive reports, and other outputs. In this session we will aim to cover some of these to help you improve the accessibility of your work.
Published

September 4, 2025

Organised by Clare Griffiths for the RSS Official Statistics Section Committee.

Session abstract

Many government departments and arms length bodies are producing data and analysis that is published in the form of dashboards and interactive reports, using applications like PowerBI, RShiny and other tools. By default these published interactive outputs do not meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 that all public bodies are required by law to meet, since September 2020.

However, there are simple steps that analysts and data scientists can take to improve the accessibility of these and other outputs. In this session we will aim to cover some of these to help you improve the accessibility of your work. One in five people in Britain have an accessibility need, so this will help you make sure that they can benefit from your work as much as anybody else.

Our four speakers will cover:

  • On-brand accessibility for memorable graphs
    • Creating colour palettes that are topic-relevant, accessibility-conscious and that work with your brand colours.
    • Choosing an accessible font and formatting text in your graph for easy readability.
    • In an iterative process, with plenty of signposting to resources that people can use, we’ll create and modify a basic graph to show the impact that each change makes. The aim is to show that this can be a really fun process as well as something that makes a huge difference!
    • Everything will be tool-agnostic, but the R code will be shared if people want to build on it.
  • afcharts
    • Introduce the afcharts R package for producing static ggplot2 charts in R following analysis function guidance.
    • Discuss benefits of reusing exiting code and learning from others rather than starting from scratch.
    • How afcharts was developed as a GSS presentation champions community project working across departments.
    • Demo of the main functions and capabilities of afcharts.
    • Demo of afcharts cookbook and engaging with users via GitHub.
    • Future plans for afcharts package.
  • Interactivity in charting
    • How can adding interactivity to charts can improve accessibility?
    • How do we design and implement interactive elements in an accessible way?
    • Signposting to resources.
    • Examples of adding tooltips.
  • Accessibility in action using Power BI
    • Power BI is a tool available to many analysts across government and can be a low to no code option, providing easier entry into building graphics
    • What Power BI does well
    • Where Power BI requires some work
    • Where Power BI struggles

Speakers

  • Clare Griffiths, Head of Public Health Analytical Product Development, Department of Health and Social Care
  • Cara Thompson, Data Visualisation Consultant, Building Stories with Data
  • Olivia Box Power, Senior Public Health Data Scientist, Department of Health and Social Care
  • Nicola Rennie, Data Visualisation Specialist, Office for National Statistics
  • Elliot Bridges, Senior Data and Insights Analyst, Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority

Slides

Further reading and resources

On-brand accessible dataviz

afcharts

Interactivity and accessibility