Assessing and Enhancing Digital Accessibility of Biological Data and Visualizations

Background

As computational biologists, we produce biological datasets, visualizations, and computational tools. Our shared goal is to make our data and tools widely usable and accessible. However, we often fail to meet the needs of certain groups of people. Our recent comprehensive accessibility evaluation shows that biological data resources are largely inaccessible to people with disabilities, with severe accessibility issues in almost 75% of all 3,112 data portals included in the study. To address the critical accessibility barriers, it is important to increase awareness of accessibility in the community and teach the workforce practical ways to enhance the accessibility of biological data resources. While there are existing resources and training opportunities that focus on content that includes no or little data, there is a lack of solutions and resources that provide insights into how to make data-intensive content accessible.

This tutorial is designed to help participants understand the importance of digital accessibility in computational biology and practice various approaches to test and implement digital accessibility of biological data and visualizations.

Learning objectives

1. Understand the importance of accessibility and current accessibility problems in the field of computational biology.
2. Learn different approaches to evaluate the accessibility of biological data resources.
3. Learn approaches to enhance the accessibility of biological data resources and visualizations.
4. Learn open problems and innovations in accessibility.

Schedule and Materials

Please refer to the schedule for the planned sessions and materials.